The Nixon Generation
Whitaker, Albert Keith
THE NIXON GENERATION BY ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER 0 n August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon entered the ornate East Room of the White House to say a final word to his cabinet, senior staff, and...
...But not only can we not be purely good (or purely bad), we cannot even recognize one side of an apparent opposite without recognizing its other...
...But it would be wrong...
...Their fascination with the conjunction of opposites reflects the reality that we all know, of being torn between happiness and sadness, bravery and cowardice, love and self-interest, knowledge and ignorance...
...These students have been instilled with a basic faith in themselves," as David Brooks puts it, alluding to the hoops they have jumped and tests they have aced...
...Relativists sneer, Nixonists smile...
...It was a speech of opposites conjoined—not only in Nixon's demeanor and his situation but also in his very expressions, and nowhere more so than in its concluding image: "The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks,some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain...
...In the end then, calls to "Seize the Day," all the earnest attempts to experience the "whole" of life and not leave out anything—all this is a busy attempt to impress oneself with one's busyness...
...My students reply with the moral of last year's hit film Vanilla Sky, told to high-flying rich boy Tom Cruise after he wrecks himself in a car crash: "Without the bitter, the sweet ain't too sweet...
...Cherish all that has been given to you...
...The books we read offer some help, in the form of images that suggest that the ideals of virtue and vice are real and attainable and not endlessly shifting values...
...One week they're into rap...
...Next semester they're capitalists...
...Relativists idolize integrity, even if it means staring into the abyss...
...In a final paper, another student universalized these thoughts: "In order for something to exist, it must have an opposite...
...Still, Nixon was the original comeback kid...
...Well, yes, three thousand innocents died in most horrific ways, but we learned to respect our firefighters and got a terrific album from Bruce Springsteen...
...It seems fitting: this attitude flourishes at the "grassroots," among the academy's "little guys...
...You want historical paradigms...
...Yes, even in 2003: "Nixon's the One...
...But Nixonists become easily intrigued by cosmological and even theological pronouncements, as long as they're suitably fuzzy...
...Among students this restlessness disguises itself as "being well balanced" and so emerges as a final element of Nixonism: a hurried, harried effort to combine all sorts of disparate activities into everyday...
...But, they add, no one's purely bad either...
...This, too, is Nixonism: a bold but brittle front masking myopic misgivings...
...Others insisted that every greatness we possess must connect to some smallness in us...
...Nixonism, then, is no more traditional or truly conservative than the famously scheming president...
...I don't really like to think about that," he said with a nervous smile...
...The transition makes sense...
...One Internet poetess puts it this way: "Simply because without sadness, would you know happiness, without loneliness would you know love...
...In the end, the Nixonists insist that happiness must be touched with misery because they won't allow themselves to imagine a state of sure and sound flourishing, a condition of settled excellence that cannot be taken from them in a moment...
...And as one student told me with a nod toward Boston's latest April sleet-shower: "Even bad weather is good, because it makes you appreciate the good weather all the more...
...Nixon cracked jokes and choked back tears...
...Hating your enemies is not the only way to destroy yourself...
...I've asked similar questions of freshmen who tell me that they don't know what they want to do, but that trying a bunch of things in college will show them their path...
...True, relativism never succeeded in blinding them completely to the worthy objects of human striving...
...Nixon's farewell came to mind recently when I was puzzling over some things that students had said in the introductory philosophy class I teach...
...Unlike the relativist, he does not deny that these opposites are real...
...Was she thinking of Seinfeld's "bizarro world...
...They take "time management" with the utmost seriousness, organizing their days like a presidential schedule...
...In the face of few job prospects, a senior recently told me: "Everything will work out OK...
...This semester they're enviros...
...The real Nixon was a charmer when he wanted to be—not so Nietzsche, the relativists' granddaddy...
...They adduce the wisdom of Phoebe of Friends who argues that the pleasure we feel in doing good deeds makes them selfish...
...But when it comes to picturing the lives many of them lead right now, one figure steps forward from history's shades...
...But most Nixonists—like Nixon himself—travel (imaginatively) to the East and come back speaking of yin and yang, celestial balance, the interconnection of man and world, or the power of karma...
...The warmth of the Nixonist's embrace also contrasts with the frigidity of the relativist's pose...
...Think selfishness differs from charity...
...Think you're on top of the world...
...Monica A. Frank tells her patients to "fully experience your emotions and the benefit they bring to your life...
...Confidential, a fellow who, precisely because of his dark wisdom, chooses the light...
...But this confidence remains more superficial than he or others realize...
...But the bete noire of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind has become a rarer species on campus, relegated to faculty offices and grad student cubicles...
...Now we are ready for the lift of a driving dream...
...Just look at the Joker and Penguin—they never do quite kill Batman...
...Like the late president's vision, my students' Nixonism has its charms...
...Or the "alternate universes" of Marvel Comics...
...For a while I wondered what to call this attitude...
...Still, clever claims about the inseparability of opposites also tend to obstruct any deeper self-reflection...
...The worst, as they see it, is to be "narrow...
...Why do you think so," I ask, "when trying a bunch of things in high school or elsewhere didn't show it to you...
...Likewise, Nixonism does, in some respects, present a more pleasant visage than relativism...
...In any case, he's filled with conflicting desires...
...It all makes you a better person in the long run...
...he was humble and proud...
...I asked...
...The man who does right must, in his view, be something like Russell Crowe's neo-noir character in L.A...
...The next week it's alternative...
...Not that relativism is gone...
...It is only a beginning, always," was his theme, as he brought his elected career to a dramatic end...
...I encourage my classes to imagine the lives they would like to live someday and to fill out those imaginations as precisely as possible...
...These young people have imbibed their culture's lessons only too well...
...Today's college students, at least at elite universities, do put on a good front...
...Not exactly...
...What...
...The Nixonist cannot idolize the Gary Cooper of High Noon, but neither does he revere the Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange...
...He didn't fall back on his great SAT scores or fine grades...
...Or, like Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, maybe he doesn't...
...The right name for this comeback philosophy that chains the demons in our souls to our better angels is Nixonism...
...We could raise the money to hush up the Watergate burglars...
...What defines Nixonism is not devotion to a cause but timidity, insecurity, second-guessing...
...THE NIXON GENERATION BY ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER 0 n August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon entered the ornate East Room of the White House to say a final word to his cabinet, senior staff, and the reporters gathered there...
...Not when even Michael Jordan commits adultery, my sports fans tell me...
...Albert Keith Whitaker teaches philosophy at Boston College...
...They eat up pop-science theories about the "Big Bang," the first fifteen seconds, oscillating universes, and super-strings...
...Unlike most intellectual contagions, Nixonism appears most among my younger students, those who have only been at college a year or two and who have no experience in philosophy...
...I found an Internet posting with earnest reflections on 9/11 titled, "Take the Good with the Bad...
...Are there any purely decent people out there...
...The Nixonist opens his arms wide and embraces all opposites—happiness and misery, virtue and vice, truth and lies...
...Several had told me, in discussions of happiness, that we can only know happiness if we know sadness...
...Instead, she had voiced an attitude that I notice more and more both on campus and off—the idea that everything in human thought and action, maybe everything in the world, is inextricably tied to its apparent opposite...
...11., 2 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003...
...These achievers scorn people with intense interest in anything as "fanatics," as though there is little difference between a devoted philatelist and Mohammed Atta...
...This unconcern also makes Nixonists much more willing to espouse what we might call "big ideas...
...Then a friend happened to remind me of Nixon...
...Complaints they make that pure happiness or Heaven itself would be "boring" are a preemptive strike against a realm they secretly fear is closed to their approach...
...Recall price controls or Vietnamization...
...It's not surprising that, as was the case with Nixon himself, these students' self-pity is palpable...
...The students of today, perfectly balanced on the culture's cutting edge, are channeling the ethical insights of our thirty-seventh president, the man who exemplified the unity of moral contraries...
...Of course...
...Nixonists aren't so finicky about "the truth...
...Its humble origin might explain why Nixonism seems to be taking over the place of an "-ism" that has long been associated with academia, with relativism...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 "But it would be wrong...
...As he put it in his second State of the Union address: "Now we must let our spirits soar again...
...Clinical psychologist Dr...
...Some even warm to the strange constructions of Plato's Timaeus or Aristotle's Metaphysics...
...Sadness is a state of happiness...
...Again, sheepish grins, nervous glances...
...From practically all those authorities around them—from their cynical teachers, their dark entertainment, their broken families—they have learned that they cannot have the goods that everyone most wants...
...My Nixonists' second-guessing means that nothing tends to be settled in their lives...
...Why are you so sure...
...This attitude is winning over the silent majority, even in the face of the seemingly stark struggles of our day...
...Relativism tends to undermine any attempt to search for the "big picture...
...But they have concluded that these high ideals, true goodness, real happiness, are no more attainable than fairy princesses or knights on white horses...
...Catholics go Buddhist and back again...
...At worst, they smudge legitimate boundaries and leave the soul vulnerable to even more destructive temptations...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
