A CONVERSATION WITH IRVING KRISTOL
A C o n v e r s a t i o n W i t h I r v i n g K r i s t o l Irving Kristol, co-editor of T H E PUBLIC INTEREST with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is one of those stalwart Liberals who answers...
...So that it's a historical process (partly of course it's a sociological process, I've not mentioned that...
...Tyrrell...
...A n d until these values are amended and improved, we'll have to cope with them as best w e can...
...M u c h of their dissatisfaction is mysterious to me...
...KRISTOL: Obviously, yes...
...No other civilization places so much importance on the individual...
...The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...It's less open in that it doesn't think seriously about ideological issues at all...
...KRISTOL: Yes, of course I'm disturbed by the growth of the new left...
...And did not this gallant quintet, when the heat was on, scurry to constitutional refuge at the loving breast of the very same mother upon w h o m they earlier had heaped their ineffable abuse...
...TYRRELL: Why...
...Yet the N e w Left's incivism was prefigured by their environment as they are the benighted products of cultural ghettoes...
...For from whence have emerged America's revolutionary vanguard...
...But we are not on the frontier of Elysian serenity...
...I therefore think it is true that a good deal of modern academic thinking, especially in the humanities and those social sciences which are closest to the huKnanities, I do think that these disciplines are not "relevant", as the younger people say...
...I think that, in this respect, young people both of left and of right have a very legitimate complaint...
...TYRRELL: Is it more open, as Howard Zinn says...
...After all, when a man's annual income moves from ^6000 to ^8000, this does not permit him to live like a lord or a king...
...TYRRELL: Do you think it has to change radically...
...KRISTOL: Oh, I'm sorry...
...KRISTOL: Yes, but Richard Weaver is a sport...
...TYRRELL: Who are they exactly...
...The stars had fallen from the heavens, even Irving Howe expressed concern...
...TYRRELL: Are you disturbed by the growth of the new left, and if so what aspect of it...
...I feel, for instance, that that kind of liberalism itself has been a corrupter of modern values...
...Hardly anyone in philosophy courses at a university reads Richard Weaver, except in a few places...
...TYRRELL: Is it more sophisticated than the old left...
...Well, perhaps, but then I have spent six informative years at liberalism's knee, memorizing the N e w Deal's catechism and bearing the Gospel of Keynes in m y bosom...
...But they have not been discussed by political philosophers in any serious way within this century...
...T o m Hayden, Rev...
...Let's put it in its simplest terltns...
...TYRRELL: Do you think a Wallace type has a chance of getting elected in 1972...
...And I certainly don't want to pander to any such sentiments...
...O n the other hand, it has paid a price for this...
...Is there a convergence here of the left and the right, the young left and the young right...
...Aren't our traditional values rather corrupt...
...Instead of (Continued on Page 12) 11 Kristol (Continued from Page 11) living in an apartment you live in a house...
...For instance, the whole transformation of the mass media that we have been witnessing in the past ten years or fifteen years is to a very large extent a response to the affluence of young people...
...The New Left, an excresence of America's great middle class, holds an essentially wombistic view of America...
...It feels it has nothing to say about that...
...A C o n v e r s a t i o n W i t h I r v i n g K r i s t o l Irving Kristol, co-editor of T H E PUBLIC INTEREST with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is one of those stalwart Liberals who answers the call to truth even when it entails disturbing the fustian of the Realm...
...So that I don't think this was entirely an accident — though, I do think a great many people didn't realize what was happening...
...Ninety-five per cent of them are mere faddists like the imbeciles who swallowed goldfish in the twenties or voted for Stevenson in the fifties...
...All they can do is discuss the mechanisms whereby people reach whatever ends they assign to themselves...
...If you go back to Jane Addams, who was a very sweet woman, and read her works you will find that she very expressedly declared that one of her purposes was to diminish the authority of the family and replace it by the authority of the social work profession and the state and so on...
...Rather than ponder the idiotic gabble of the Rudds, Haydens and Rubins, civilized America, even adult America, might better consider why they are saying it...
...Why is this imdesirable...
...But are America's mini-Guevaras worthy of adult America's troubled meditations...
...And no one expected it to have such cataclysmic consequences...
...It is the young people in our society today w h o are far, far more affluent than young people ever were...
...And "Is this the kind of life w e want to live...
...For gestation and implementation of a program demands intelligence which Colonel Cohn-Bendit in this magnum (Continued on Page 9) 8 . '^<UH*H4f ^cufdett wad, dUctutened wfus/p^aed in i4AMiddlUta, clotkei, . opus, has shown woefully missing from his repertory of Divine Gifts...
...KRISTOL: O h , this not George Jean Nathan...
...The old left had young people in it, but it was an adult movement — led by adults, defined by adults, organized by adults, with a program written by adults...
...SDS...
...I thought you imeant George Jean Nathan...
...TYRRELL: In a recent New York Times article you said the church and family left it to schools to transmit values...
...Are Wallace types going to repress them...
...What was your other question...
...Basically, what I was trying to say was that any kind of militance — especially extralegal activity — on the part of the left in this country wiU certainly give rise to a corresponding reaction on the part of the public at large and the governmental authorities...
...Mainly I'm disturbed by two things...
...Certainly Liberalism is unwell — and its condition worsens...
...Kristol still seeks the dilation of opportunity and a more bearable life for all...
...These people demand instant improvement and of course you never do get instant improvement in real life...
...I see no prospect of that whatsoever...
...Political philosophy has taken a completely different turn...
...David Dellinger festered on it from another...
...TYRRELL: Is the new left really that new...
...A n d so I have a certain sympathy with the hippies and the new left because I do think that for the first time in many decades they are posing before this society some philosophical questions — real fundamental questions, which the academics have been avoiding very diligently n o w for quite a few decades...
...What they are is as hypocritical as their parents though less cultivated, as faddish as the raccoon coat, and just a little reactionary...
...Their crusade against capitalism is hardly new, a confused German ne'er-do-well laimched it over a century ago...
...The record industry sells its products to young people...
...What is distinctive about the new left is that it is a generational movement as well as a political movement...
...Adult America need not contort its brow over what radicals are saying...
...Olympus...
...TYRRELL: Well this anticipates a later question of mine...
...I think they must analyze the causes of the condition they seek to cure and the consequences of the cures thiey recommend...
...In fact Kenneth Keniston, in his authoritative white wash...
...TYRRELL: You mentioned, in the New York Times, that you felt the hippie was interested in moral ends...
...Civilizations have a way of not falling apart all that easily...
...And I personally have no objections to a young man wanting to become a radical if he feels the need for radical change...
...I really see no justification for such a proposal...
...12...
...Everyone is far more interested in the kind of posture he strikes than in a program that would have some effect upon society...
...Until the Committee on Truth in Packaging investigates their claims, I fear I cannot buy their sausage, for what is new about relativism, collectivism, permissivism, dilettanteism and prehistoric Marxist gurus...
...They can no more conceive performance of an autopsy on Liberalism than accept the Reverend Geo...
...These are people, w h o not only have had no political experience — one really couldn't expect them to have had political experience — but w h o have a singular unwillingness and uninterest in learning from past political experience and therefore have no sense of the limits of politics...
...O n the other hand, there's also no doubt that students, especially in the humanities, and especially in the so-called softer social sciences — areas which traditionally used to deal with the basic issues of himnan existence, human society and human life — find that these disciplines have abandoned that field...
...Intoning witless asininities like "do your own thing," those of the N e w Left manifest the same relativism as Schlesinger I. A n d when they bastinado computers, fertilize poor old Grayson Kirk's carpet and reenact the Berlin siege on campuses across the country they are merely enacting the logical denouement of relativism — namely, mindless nihilism...
...Modern philosophy is overwhelmingly analytical...
...That is, they have challenged the values and the ends of bourgeois society...
...But basically I really do think this was a program of, one might almost say, the m o d e m world, since very few people opposed it...
...It was the prograkn of modern liberalism and even of much of modem conservatism...
...KRISTOL: Well, that's one part of it, yes...
...Can you explain that...
...It is not he but "the intellectuals" who have changed, making anti-intellectualism the sought after epithet of thinking men...
...The young people of this country today are bored with a lot of the sterile academicism...
...Nathan judgment that the N e w Left swings from Liberalism's family tree...
...These people were Utopian (not particularly radical people, like John Dewey, Jane Addams, the entire progressive miovement in academic studies the "new realism" 10 in law, the "new history" and of course they contributed to the prevalence of relativistai as a philosophy...
...Through the inclination of relativism...
...He's not regarded as an important American philosopher...
...Yet their great awakening is hopeless, they are not revolutionary, they are not portentous, they are not profound...
...KRISTOL: Oh, I don't know what that means...
...He is still a Liberal...
...I doubt it...
...The affluence of young people has, I think, had a tremendous effect upon our entire culture, much more so than the affluence of the average American, or even of the rich American...
...Perplexed by the quality of life pop culture has left them, m y guess is that they long for a system of values, the enrichment of tradition, the exhilaration of individual freedom, purpose transcending materialism, dignity, truth, maybe even God . But, alas, they cannot overcome their environment . . . they are too stupid...
...These disciplines do not respond to the basic questions which any sensitive and intelligent young person wants to see discussed — not only wants to see discussed, but wants to discuss and explore for himself...
...Fortified with a strong infusion of embarrassingly middleclass Puritanism, its gnomes sniff a little immorality in the Pentagon, impurity in the State Department and, in their moralistic zeal, see the ruthless grape tycoons of Delano, California as a threat to hiunanity...
...TYRRELL: This is one who writes for T H E ALTERNATIVE...
...TYRRELL: How are they going to exist in the future...
...Combining effrontery with obscenity he maculated the pages of T H E N E W REPUBLIC with a thoughtful essay endorsing Hubert Humphrey's candidacy and but a few months later uttered the unmentionable: to wit, the country is moving to the right and the universities are a blight on education in America...
...KRISTOL: Yes, I still have that view, though I wasn't thinking specifically of Nixon or of this administration when I made that prediction...
...TYRRELL: You don't feel affluence plays that great a role...
...Unfortunately they seem to have no method for changing the people w h o live in this country overnight in a very radical and quick way, and therefore I regard their plans as Utopian...
...Are our values corrupt...
...TYRRELL: No, no, no...
...I don't know that they're more cormpt than the values of other civilizations, though I might even concede that in some senses they are...
...O n the other hand, it is what it is as a result of several hundred years of history...
...But things could always be worse, we could have sent Nathan...
...But I don't think anyone, young or old, has the right to be mindless...
...KRISTOL: No, I think it's less sophisticated than the old left, precisely because it is a movement of young people...
...Galbraith's aging dream of comfy collectivism...
...Not just pointing to its imperfections, but saying "Is this the kind of society we want to have...
...KRISTOL: I think there's a convergence of youth, yes...
...TYRRELL: George Nathan says it is unhealthy for a state to suffer liberalism's domination of education, communication and national policy...
...How will it exist in the future...
...I don't think anyone really knows...
...What really is new about the new left is not any particular ideology — the fact is that it is somewhat more anarchist and less bolshevik, that doesn't matter, we've had anarchist movements in the past...
...It does not feel that it has any authority even to discuss the ends of man, the ends of society...
...It was there that I read about His Holiness Eugene McCarthy's excommunication of Hubert Humphrey ( A D A lifetime rating 9 8 % ) . Tearfully, the Times watched the thalidomide intellectuals of the N e w Politics' slash their umbilical cords from the A D A . Dismayed, it chronicled Daniel Patrick Moynihan embarking on an ideological odyssey toward the forbidden lands of Richard Nixon...
...KRISTOL: Yes and no...
...Computers and electronic technology are conducing America into a technecratic society...
...Some of their dissatisfaction I understand...
...And even if they may be false in certain important respects, they simply can't be shoved aside...
...Yet a revolution advancing program derived from the past and offering no program for the future is counter-revolutionary...
...In short I think it likely that even liberal administrations of the future are likely to be far less liberal than they have been in the past...
...In FOREIGN AFFAIRS he transfixed a whole genre of charlatans by defining the intellectual as "a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence...
...W e assume his life has its unpleasant moments such as when, in his kindness, he grants interviews to people like our editor, Mr...
...He wages guerilla warfare against the system...
...KRISTOL: I think affluence does play a role, but in certain special ways...
...The N e w Left, because it is responding to the past rather than anticipating the future (its humor as expressed in Hair and by the Yippies satirizes an America that has not existed for twenty years), is already worthy of lodging in history's trophy case...
...Its truths have suffered thirty years of erosion...
...It seems to me, that the young right has been asking these questions also, though they are not so darlingized for their utterances...
...And the result is that the field has been invaded by all sorts of quackeries, all sorts of amateur philosophies...
...TYRRELL: Before the 1968 election, you said you saw the future of American politics as being "considerably less liberal than in past decades...
...The notion that you can change things overnight strikes m e as utterly fantastic...
...I read of Everett Dirksen, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace plucking at Liberalism from one direction while Dr...
...I'm also alarmed at what I can only call the intellectual infantilism of the new left...
...These people are consumers...
...They have no sense of the way in which human purposes go awry...
...Obviously, it is not surprising that some young people should be radical...
...KRISTOL: I was thinking, of course, prilmarily of students and some faculty on the campuses...
...KRISTOL: Oh, I'm not really worried about the Wallace type...
...Oh, but, many will respond pish posh and pooh pooh, for America's philosophical sea slugs accept as a certitude that Liberalism flourishes from sea to shining sea...
...television orients itself more and more to young spenders...
...In a way they are...
...Do you still have this view and is Nixon the fulfillment of your vision...
...Do you still make that distinction or do you see a convergence in certain situations...
...the fact that certain economic developments have made the family, as an economic unit, weaker than it once was...
...Their reliance on authoritarianism was a familiar recourse for prehensile N e w Dealers like Harry Hopkins and General Hugh Johnson...
...Has that minority yet emerged and who constitutes it...
...Thus he profanes those tabernacles of Liberalism, the universities, which he loathes — for they have proffered him nothing but eroded truths and unanswered questions...
...How has America, as you said, "progressively diminished the moral authority of all existing institutions...
...Marcuse almost programs it, it seems, and Paul Goodman and Mailer . . . KRISTOL: It has its gurus, obviously, older gurus — any movement will...
...KRISTOL: No, certainly not in 1972...
...he even desecrates the Democratic National Convention...
...Provincial education like this naturally leads to unfulfilled philosophic yearnings, moral idiocy and adherence to a value system that is at best stylistic...
...O n the other hand, this civilization has created problems for itself...
...N o w mind you, I must be careful about this...
...And affluent not only in the sense that they have more pocket money, but that they have control over resources...
...Even a lame brain like Rennie Davis will weary, become frustrated, feel deserted and aspire to a certitude like destruction...
...KRISTOL: I don't know whether it has to or not...
...The modern spirit of critical inquiry as it developed, not only within the universities, but within the world of letters and within the world of journalism over the past eighty years, had as its purpose precisely that: the diminishing of the authority of existing institutions, and most especially of the family and of the schools and of the churches...
...Mark Rudd's manager was that cruelly depressed area, Maple Wood, N e w Jersey...
...But there was a theory behind this, and the theory was that if you diminish these traditional authorities, a latent and hitherto repressed creativity and goodness and sweetness would flow from human beings...
...T H E ALTERNATIVE greatly admires Mr...
...I don't think what you call affluence has corrupted the soul of the average American because the average American just isn't that affluent...
...Where did it come from...
...I think this is going to be self-defeating for them and is going to create a great deal of damage to all of us...
...Had Irving Kristol thrown in with the Albigensians...
...KRISTOL: I honestly don't know...
...They listen to Huntley and Brinkley . . . They are Informed, and, natch, they dismiss m y conclusion as Uninformed...
...True revolution must approximate more than a spasming past...
...And, as I say, moving from ^6000 a year to ^8000 a year or from ^7000 a year to ^10,000 a year (which is almost a 5 0 % increase) does not transform a person's values...
...W e doubt it...
...As the industrial era, in America, draws to an end, America, its regnant philosophy (Liberalism) and its vast middle-class are boimd to imdergo drastic social change, perhaps revolution...
...This traditional notion of what a liberal should do strikes me as wrong...
...But the house, after all, is not a lavish thing — I mean, most Ataiericans live in quite modest houses...
...Young Radicals, reports that these crazed darlings generally are bred in the suburbs of middle- and upper-middle class where permissivism has become a fetish...
...He certainly seems to be interested in the quality of life one leads...
...Students for Democratic Society) KRISTOL: Well, not only SDS, although of course S D S is one of the groups...
...Before his splendid days at Columbia I suspect Mark Rudd's closest brush with violence was a ferocious struggle with an inflamed pimple or in the back seat of the family's Oldsmobile...
...I think there is one obstacle to a full-scale merger, which is that the new left, if it ever is really going to do anything politically, has to create a disciplined organization out of people who are "high" half the time, w h o don't come to meetings on time, w h o are not responsible for the execution of sSmall assignments and so on...
...And, S D S ' prescription for the ills of free enterprise is nothing more than a nightmare edition of Dr...
...But where affluence has played a role, a very important role, is among young people...
...Devoutly I have poured over the Sunday N e w York Times...
...O n the other hand, these are the values that regulate the way w e live together...
...I'm sorry, should I have...
...The major difference between the new left and the old left is that the new left is a left of young people...
...This is not the most beautiful of all societies and this is not even the most civilized of all societies...
...A n d everyone is now becoming aware of the price, that western individualism does create tremendous strains upon the individual, and does produce tremendous strains within the community, and is corrosive of many of the things that even Frank Meyer would cherish...
...The proper role of the liberal is to snipe at the society from the periphery as he does...
...What I do see, however, is that if they insist on be(Continued on Page 10) T l i e N e w L e f t : A D i s e a s e F o r O u r T i m e by George Nathan Contemporary symptoms indicate Liberalism is suffering cultural ataxia, leaving the N e w Left as diseased Liberalism's last spasming extremity...
...KRISTOL: Well because his whole approach to philosophy deals with problems that modern philosophy has abandoned...
...Suffering perpetual cerebral diaper rash, the N e w Left fusses and frets, but represents nothing more than the illiterate conscience of a philosophy in decline...
...The salons of Greenwich Village...
...U h . . . no . . . T o m m y Hayden was discovered wrapped in swaddling clothes among the sheep and asses of Royal Oak, Michigan...
...A n d in the abstract, there is no reason w h y it shouldn't take place...
...Recently, that eminent cosmopolitan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in Obsolete Communism, continuously dismissed any thought of a program as antique, mysterious, impure and, may I add, beyond his exiguous capabilities...
...They will kick her in the shins, ignore her entreaties, but always return to her cushiony breasts for legal solace...
...The people who live in it are what they are as a result of these himdreds of years of history...
...Hope springs eternal, and many of the supermarket republic's leading butchers are offering us the N e w Left's baloney as the newest stuff...
...I mean I don't see any specter of Neo-fascism on the American horizon...
...Or will things go farther to the right...
...But I think you have a much larger group, of students and faculty both, who have an insistence that this country change in a radical way very, very quickly...
...But to urge this and prescribe this for a large body of people strikes m e as absurd...
...They adjudge the N e w Left an increate, singular, revolutionary salvation army, no more closely related, ideologically, to the Old Left than to the Elks...
...O n the whole I'm in sympathy with — I mean, as I say, being a product of western civilization — I'm irrevocably more individualist than, for instance, any Buddhist is likely to be...
...False values are better than none...
...TYRRELL: But it's led by older people like Marcuse...
...Here, in the ranchtype jungles, Spockean inspired mothers have procreated mankind's most advanced form...
...And the difference is not of an order that is likely to greatly affect his moral values...
...No, well, we'll wipe that out...
...TYRRELL: You have stated that the church and the family have neglected transmitting moral authority and traditions...
...A n d what alarms m e about the new left is that it is the politics of expressionism...
...Yet, though apparent that Liberalism will soon romp with the archangels, we are not to conclude that all leftist thought will perish...
...They have no sense of the time that is needed to make constructive social change...
...Isn't western civilization about to fall apart from exhaustion...
...They have meticulously attuned themselves to every social tremor quivering across the land...
...Yet from those weekly readings I received m y first tip-off to Liberalism's unease...
...If a single individual, for personal reasons, feels that he must sit on the sidelines and throw rocks, all right...
...But I think it is true that the generational quality of this movehient is just as important as its political beliefs...
...Eldridge Cleaver and Rt...
...KRISTOL: I don't agree with that...
...TYRRELL: Well, T m reading a book by Richard Weaver right now...
...TYRRELL: Has it had unfortunate consequences...
...When the programs of the Yapping Left are not Old Left retreads, they are confused or non-existent...
...Indeed it is the traditional notion of what a liberal has done and most liberals unfortunately have done that...
...So often when young people denounce their studies as "irrelevant," very often that is simply an exercise in anti-intellectualism — that is, they don't want to read Plato because he is very hard, and he lived a long time ago, and the meaning of what he said is not instantly obvious...
...TYRRELL: You once drew a distinction between the hippie and the new left...
...But he is also a man possessing the intelligence and audacity to look for answers beyond the encumbrances of stylish ideology...
...They really did feel that these authorities could be dispensed with, that if you got rid of them, human beings would live much fuller and happier and more contented lives without the benefits of extertial authority, that a sense of free community could flow from their iimermost souls...
...W h e n w e talk in the mass, these are the kinds of changes w e are talking about...
...Which Nathan is this...
...It is very hard to be for tradition, for instance, and at the same time to celebrate the unqualified virtues of individualism...
...Recently he has, through his persuasive prose, impaled more than a few of the Republic's leading quacks...
...The enlightened darlings and their gurus see America as an indulgent, tear-streaked mother...
...It's more open in the sense that it has no fixed, carefully thought through ideology...
...KRISTOL: Well, what is new about the new left is its identification of a political mythology with a generational mythology...
...TYRRELL: Do you agree vwth Frank Meyer when he says western civilization is superior to all other civilizations because it stresses the primacy of the individual...
...They have done what our academic political thinkers have singularly failed to do over, the past eighty or ninety years...
...Such acute cultural deprivation could have baneful effects even on a person of m y strong moral character...
...They see it pollinating in the academies, overgrowing the media, nourishing the luminaries of our generation and even affixing itself to the fads of the suburban middle class...
...Similarly political theory and political philosophy say they have no competence to discuss the ends of political society...
...Kristol (Continued from Page 7) ing militant and resorting to extralegal activities, they will probably be put down, not by Wallace, but even by a liberal administration...
...It was a very attractive vision which is one of the reasons it had so much success...
...All it can do is criticize the way in which other people discuss the ends of society...
...First, its rather mindless commitment to confrontation and violence...
...Even Liberaldom's farm teams at Columbia, Harvard and Chicago report unpleasant disturbances...
...H o m o primadonnsis, whose most adhesive commitment is to the rigors of coimtry club frolics and dancing school...
...Now the schools are neglecting this...
...This is not what he had in mind...
...I mean they're obviously converging in some respects...
...that is, the movement towards affluence among the mass of A - mericans has been relatively small as far as its affects on daily living is concerned...
...And the other five per cent are but the diseased organisms of Liberalism...
...KRISTOL: Yes, I would agree with that...
...and in its residue of gravel and red clay one can barely grow weeds...
...The appearance of — I think (Continued on Page 11) Kristol (Continued from Page 10) they call themselves the Yippies — would seelm to indicate that some people feel an amalgamation or a merger is possible...
...He's an exception...
...W e did it because that's what we set out to do...
...But then, you see Nathan like Mencken — TYRRELL: No this is a different Nathan...
...You know, John Dewey was against censorship and for freedom, but John Dewey, were he alive today, would be absolutely horrified at the things that are being done in the name of free creativity...
...KRISTOL: Well, let m e say this in favor of the hippies and even of the new left...
...people cannot live in a vacuum...
...I was looking much further ahead...
...Did not the famous Boston Five (Spock, Coffin, Ferber, Goodman and Raskin) publicly counsel draft evasion as characterized by Coffin's declaration, "we hereby publicly counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces...
...Ah, yes, here is where the great revolution spawned, at back yard swimming pools, in the haunting shadows of Daddy's barbecue pit...
...As their parents are generally (even Keniston admits it) drippy Liberals, their entire lives have been one unbroken seminar in Liberalism...
...N o w these are the traditional problems of political philosophy...
...KRISTOL: I've never heard of him...
...I don't think it's very helpful for society to have its best brains deciding beforehand that all they're going to do is sit on the sidelines and throw rocks...
...TYRRELL: You have remarked on the emergence of an "unreasonable revolution of Utopian expectations on the part of a significant minority...
Vol. 2 • May 1969 • No. 5
