AN INTERVIEW
MEYER, FRANK S.
Pol. Sci. 474-3 Frank S. Meyer Born in N e w Jersey, educated at Princeton, Oxford and the University of Chicago, Professor Frank S. Meyer was for fourteen years a member of the American...
...They haven't got the wisdom, they haven't got the experience and if they're untrained they haven't got the historical and philosophical perspective...
...Tyrrell: Well, in National Review you attack M E Y E R : I think there are pockets of poverty in this country, which can easily be wiped out by the further development of the affluence of this society...
...The strength will for the foreseeable future rest in the Soviet Union which is industrially and militarily infinitely more advanced than China...
...But the broad appeal, the general tendency of the new left seems to m e to be essentially nihilistic...
...Under Moscow's leadership...
...If we made a solid alliance, showed such tremendous force in the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union might stop its effort to get a foothold there, and maybe our so-called allies would give us some help...
...because they do not believe in any truth, because they do not understand that the guide to life on this earth must be transcendental good and truth...
...Tyrrell: Because they don't stress the sovereignty of the individual...
...It's not China but the Soviet Union who is moving toward world domination...
...To assist the neophyte bibliophobe the Trustees have collected several titles indicative of the sought after ten: 1.) J. W . Halfbright's The Arrogance of Power...
...Tyrrell: The multiversity was described recently as a dinosaur — something that has grown too large and can no longer exist in the environment it presently M E Y E R : Essentially yes...
...D o you agree with that...
...To contribute to the depopulation of the book world, each prospective student must bring ten such unsavory incunabula...
...Tyrrell: Senator McGovern and The N e w Republic have discovered that 27,000,000 Americans go to bed hungry every night, in spite of Mrs...
...Today he is a distinguished spokesman for modern conservatism...
...And I think it has taken its leadership from the anarchistic aspect of Maoism in the N e w Guard period, from Castroism and Che Guevara and from the writings of Fanon and Debray...
...Their education is infinitely better, isn't it...
...In terms of a general knowledge and wisdom of the tradition of their society, of their civilization, in philosophic terms and so forth...
...And no society will have that number of society...
...Or shall we say the selfishness and self-centeredness of a large number of moderate students have made the draft issue on which the new left is able to get wide support over and beyond their own ranks...
...M E Y E R : This is at the center of it — because they do not stress the sovereignty of the individual, grapes in California and hunger in Appalachia are that serious...
...No, if you had an ideal new left university, you'd have something twice the size of the University of California...
...H e will not be shocked...
...There is also a split between what is referred to as the old left (sort of socialist and communist old left) and the so-called new left which I would say is fundamentally anarchistic and nihilistic...
...But fundamental13 ly I think a teaching unit for more than, at the most, 2000-3000 people is too much, and ideally the teaching unit should be for about 500-600...
...Universities are becoming laughable in the United States, and partly of course what's happening is that the twelve years spent in grammar school and high school are about eighty percent wasted...
...Professor Meyer's thoughtful articles have appeared in such diverse journals as The N e w Republic (interestingly this article appeared after his break with communism) and Triumph...
...Meanwhile I suspect that the only power in China today is the Chinese army, and that this power in turn is not centered in Peking but is in the hands of a series of warlords, very much like the warlords of the early twentieth century, scattered through the various areas of China...
...9.) Norman Mailer's Cannibals and Christians...
...A certain number of people should be educated at a certain level, others who are capable of it to a higher level, still others to a still higher level...
...I suppose it is partially a leftist movement which also is disgusted with the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and therefore discouraged with communism...
...Undoubtedly within the new left there are much more organized sections, communists of various kinds — orthodox, Trotskyite, Maoist, Castroite, who I strongly suspect but can't prove are gaining a good deal of influence there and, being an organized segment, are very likely to gain even more in the future...
...of nihilism...
...MEYER: Are we...
...H o w are they ever going to reform...
...But I was speaking of the traditions of western civilization, which is the greatest civilization the world has ever seen because it has put the person, the individual at* the center of should be a steady cut-off...
...M E Y E R : That would require m e to bring together in a single sentence the entire wisdom of the west of over 2000 years...
...M E Y E R : I would say that part of the whole problem is that you cannot educate the number of people we are presently educating at the higher level...
...Tyrrell: But these problems today are pressing, are they not...
...And it isn't a matter of brotherhood, it's a matter of where the strength rests...
...For his wide erudition, incessant intelligence and intense faith...
...5.) Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice...
...And when we are part of that world, I a m determined that it must be destroyed if the U. S. is to survive, and if western civilization is to survive...
...Furthermore what's happening in China at this stage is not communism...
...It is now alleged by our county prosecutor that the Hon...
...8.) Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures...
...Mr...
...Whafs wrong with teaching people how to eliminate poverty in Harlem...
...Or rather you do not feel that young people should writhe in concern over them...
...The universities will obviously only serve the function they should when those who pay the bill, whether they are parents paying tuition or parents as taxpayers paying taxes, demand that they play the function they should...
...Robinson's affluence...
...I think there may be a few areas in which a certain amount of special attention needs to be paid, and I think that should be paid by private individuals, who are worried about this, organizing themselves into charitable institutions, and doing something about it...
...Professor Meyer's remarks commend especial consideration...
...Continued from Page 4) M E Y E R Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Iran...
...John L. Kelley as Warren Gamaliel Harding Professor of History at Iberia College, Iberia, Ohio...
...try and gave most backward sections of the population a standard of living greater than that of a feudal lord 700 years ago, and greater than that of middleclass and upper-middle-class people in many parts of the world today...
...Tyrrell: Your provocative book The Moulding of Communists indicates you hold an unsavory remembrance of your years as a communist...
...Even granted that you put a lot more money into the situation than we're putting, ten - twenty times the amount, we simply do not have the teachers...
...This has nothing to do with "relevance", nothing whatever to do with any one of the thousand idiocies which are taught in the university, which should limit itself to language, literature, philosophy, history, mathematics and science...
...I do not think it will succeed...
...Is it because of the war or has some other issue induced their delirium...
...It isn't exactly — well I suppose if you want to follow through this disease analogy — rather than saying it's part of the same syndrome or the same disease, it's as if a person had been seriously weakened by a chronic disease and then got pneumonia...
...All other books brought to the Free University will be cremated in what promises to be Southern Indiana's greatest bookbuming extravaganza...
...7.) Edward Beecher's The Panel Conspiracy Exposed and Protestantism Defended...
...But it is not specifically either the old liberal or the old communist...
...And this m a y look like a long way off today...
...And the parents will only do that when they are educated by a leadership to do that...
...Irving Kristol says that they cannot bring about reform from within...
...They're exposed to far more in high school today than they were thirty years ago...
...Tyrrell: Today it seems that the left is breaking up, at least in the Democratic convention and sequent campaign we saw a chaotic fracturing of the left...
...The novitiate who brings the greatest number of books on the Trustee's secret list will receive complementary copies of Rev...
...He won't think the world is a cocoon...
...That is to say, unlike the liberals, who wish to reform society and the communists who wish to transform society and seize power, the new left's attitude seems to be one of utter negativity...
...474-3 Frank S. Meyer Born in N e w Jersey, educated at Princeton, Oxford and the University of Chicago, Professor Frank S. Meyer was for fourteen years a member of the American Communist Party working in agitprop...
...Whatever else m a y be said about what is wrong with today's society, the material affluence in the U. S. is not something that can be criticized...
...And liberalism can give people nothing...
...Are trends portending a liberal collapse as you see them...
...I could perhaps, no, I don't think there's any way of summarizing it...
...M E Y E R : He does say that...
...Sweet it was who aided in efficient removal of some seventy thousand cumbersome books from the Indiana University Library at the reasonable expense of but two matches...
...Tyrrell: From where has the new left evolved...
...n M E Y E R : Vested interests in what...
...MEYER: Yes...
...I think that China will eventually come under control of the communist party again and will then be definitely part of the Moscow war machine...
...And it's for these three areas that the Soviet Union is competing with the United States...
...China has not been a nation for very long at all...
...Fundamentally however, I think that the reason is that the liberalism that's been dominant in the universities in the past thirty, forty or fifty years has come to full fruition in the last few years...
...There are problems — the problem of the breakdown of ethics, the problem of the breakdown of morality, problems of the breakdown of understanding, the breakdown of the universities...
...Besides the world seems to be going his way...
...There exists a communist party of China which is under terrific attack from anarchistic groups very similar to some of the student revolutions in the world as a whole today...
...Some may suggest that book-burning smacks of Hitlerite tactics...
...He has authored The Moulding of Communists, What is Conservatism and, most recently and widely acclaimed...
...In fact one of their phrases, "creative disorder", goes back to that period...
...Poland was on a slacker rein in 1957 than it is today...
...H e will know what the world is really like, not simply from the narrow 14 myopic vision of one city at one time, but from the perspective of thousands of years of history and from an understanding of human beings, with the present held in proportion...
...Tyrrell: What about the shock in store for one of your ideal students as he steps off the ivory tower into N e w York City and sees what things are really like down there...
...today is often worse trained than a grammar school student of 1870...
...Tyrrell: It seems that in the last two years leftists have simply gone into a frenzy...
...I think it's the liberals, the intellectuals, the newspapermen, the television media, the faculties of our universities, the persons who are the leaders of our liberalism and the leaders of our new left — it is they who are anti-western...
...To commence this summer's festivities, the Free University of Ellettsville aimounces a bibliophobe contest...
...Tyrrell: What is going to happen to the universities...
...The Conservative Mainstream...
...M E Y E R : I a m opposed to Communism because it is a worldwide enterprise determined on conquering the world...
...Maybe I exaggerate when I say a grammar school student, but certainly a high school student...
...Tyrrell: What is the greatest problem facing our society...
...Tyrrell: Well how can you say world communism exists when we see it falling apart, we see the battles...
...There are also secondary theaters such as the Mediterranean and the Near East and the Indian Ocean, in which at the moment the Soviet Union is making greater progress than in the previous 600 years of effort to gain control of the Mediterranean by their predecessors or themselves...
...All of North Vietnam's aid, ninety percent of it, comes from the Soviet Union...
...M E Y E R : No, because they are not trying to tear it apart in order to establish a imiversity determined to teach the Western tradition, m a n to man, faculty member to student, on the basis of a strict, disciplined curriculum...
...The human beings are created best outside of the hurly-burly of the world, in isolation, where they can be taught how to think, and write and speak and read, and where they can be taught the tradition of their civilization with which they will then be armed to go out and solve problems...
...Kelley is the author of Harding: The First Edward Kennedy...
...M E Y E R : Yes, as the liberals gain power and destroy the foundations of western civilization...
...M E Y E R : I'll have to correct that statement...
...Tyrrell: It certainly seems that Russian communism is losing its influence in Eastern Europe...
...But at the moment China is in chaos and doesn't count...
...And then if they get people involved in action on that issue, they can convince them of other things...
...Tyrrell: What about Poland...
...2.) Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary...
...Tyrrell: Would you care to say what that truth is...
...Tyrrell: Thus as the new left tears university after university apart, you feel they're performing a sound social function...
...But I think it is very definitely our concern when there exists a world power, not in the sense of a nation alone or an idea alone or a propaganda arm alone, as you put it, but as a combination of a secular atheistic church with an army, deeply, fundamentally and ideologically determined to conquer the world...
...On the material level, this is idiocy...
...The liberals do not teach people the tradition of western civilization, they do not give them anything to hold on to...
...There is no will to govern on the part of liberal leadership, there's no will to teach on the part of liberal teachers...
...Tyrrell: In other words the mass society as it is evolving today (the liberal calls it monopolistic or corporate society), is in your estimation anti-western...
...It seems to m e international in character...
...Tyrrell: But we're turning out students now who are wiser than any students in the past...
...M E Y E R : What in hell are you talking about...
...M E Y E R : It seems to m e that what is good for a human being is good for a human being...
...So I would say the new left is essentially a throwback in certain respects to the older nineteenth century anarchism...
...David Noebel's (a m an of God with Dr...
...World communism centers in the Soviet Union...
...If it hadn't been the draft it might have been harder for them to get as wide a group as they've gotten...
...The moment it becomes a problem-solving institution it ceases to be a university...
...In point of fact, however, this is not the kind of social movement that can ever be more than destructive...
...The Saturday Evening Club Proudly Announces: Appointment of Dr...
...W e cite the magnificent reformation examples of John Calvin, Charles Sweet* and Girolamo Savonarola...
...The pneumonia wasn't caused by whatever it was that seriously weakened him but the serious weakening makes the pneumonia rage like fury...
...And furthermore when we speak in terms of conquest we don't speak in terms of every square inch of the earth's surface...
...W h o is the kid taking over Columbia and tearing apart the President's office...
...M E Y E R : No problems are ever solved by idealism...
...And this shows perhaps our policy of tolerance has been judicious...
...Impossible as it m a y seem, the Trustees have selected a list of books worse than the above sample...
...Nonsense...
...In a sense it's also a reaction against liberalism...
...teachers to teach on that level that number of people...
...M E Y E R : Just how this movement became imbued with the attitudes that were essentially romantic anarchist attitudes of the nineteenth century, I've not been able to find out...
...Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade) classic exposes Rhythm, Riots and Revolution and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles...
...There may be minor Chinese influence...
...Tyrrell: What is so marvelous about our society...
...Tyrrell: Then you are opposed to communism mainly because ifs the propaganda arm, the public relations arm of a foreign power...
...Into this void anyone who has any determined position can step, and that's why the new left has gotten the following it has...
...Do you feel that the United States is involved in a struggle with world communism...
...Communism is certainly undergoing a thaw in these areas isn't it...
...Mr...
...The Vietnam war would be over tomorrow if the Soviet Union decided it wanted it to be, as it has fundamental control there...
...I said earlier I think maybe the Chinese communist party will again gain power, but I think this m a y not be for a long, long period...
...M E Y E R : Well it's the product of liberalism in one sense...
...The university cannot purge itself...
...Would it have started without the war...
...There...
...M E Y E R : If 27,000,000 Americans go to bed hungry every night, they are dieting...
...I have no interest, and I think the U. S. should have no interest, in how any other people govern themselves...
...Most of what a B. A. knows today from an average college he could know by the end of his second year of high school if we had proper grammar and high schools...
...It seems to m e that our society after 2000 years has bred nothing but 27,000,000 hungry Americans...
...No, young people are not the people to solve problems...
...It's hard to imagine either the white or the black new left, either the student power people or the black power people, really seriously intending, as the communists did, to take over society and remold it...
...Meyer will appear in debate during this October's "Alternative Week...
...It has achieved a national image only under the Kuomintang and then to some degree under communism...
...Just as we wiped out most of the poverty in this counrelativism often but it seems to m e that what is good for one person might just simply not be good for another...
...But we cah get along without them...
...There is no question about the fact that the American population as a whole — even that section of it which is the worst off, the Negro section — is better off than any other people...
...I don't think it's our concern how people govern themselves...
...W e salute you, O Noble Pyromaniac of Indiana University, remembering the fond words of another firebrand, Voltaire: "Nothing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged...
...What the Czars could never do, the Soviet Union has done, and Russia is now a Mediterranean power with bases in Egj^jt and Algeria and Syria...
...I don't think China exists as a major force in the world today...
...They have no such aim in mind at all — they have the opposite aim in mind, to make the dinosaur multiversity absolutely necessary because they want to turn the university from a place in which people retire from the world for a few years to prepare themselves for it, into some replica of the world in which all the nefarious, nervous confusion of the world is repeated...
...Is the new left a symptom of terminal liberalism, or the natural product of its disease...
...Problems of a social character are solved by wisdom, which may contain a modicum of idealism, but which is fundamentally a knowledge of reality, a knowledge of what is possible and what is not possible and how to go about doing it...
...M E Y E R : By world communism I mean, for all practical purposes, that commimism which is directed by the second major military power in the world, the Soviet Union, and which dominates all the communist countries except Yugoslavia and China...
...But these are not, unfortunately, the problems about which people are worried in your generation...
...There are pressing problems today, they must be solved now and it seems young people are the only people with the idealism for solving these problems...
...Tyrrell: In other words you don't feel that the problems we worry ourselves over, the problems of M E Y E R : Oh no, I don't think it's the corporations that are anti-western...
...Tyrrell: North Vietnam...
...Tyrrell: Well now whafs wrong with relevance...
...Tyrrell: Thus would you agree with the eminent Nathan when he speaks of liberalism as a victim of cultural ataxia and of the new left as the last spasming extremity of that disease...
...15 Tyrrell: You mean cutting budgets might prove salubrious for the universities in the long run...
...Rebelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel...
...3.) Arthur M . Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Liberal Hour...
...I would be, if there were not an armed enterprise determined on our destruction, an isolationist...
...These are pockets in our society, these are not big problems...
...One is defense against the world-conquering impetus of Soviet communism and the other is the restoration of order in our society...
...Senior Editor of National Review, Editorial Advisor for M o d e m Age, and, as he works nights, an occasional adviser to the house organ of modern ontology The Alternative...
...This is a demand of charity, and that's about all...
...Tyrrell: It seems to be degraded more and more today though...
...He will see how human beings have solved problems in the past, and he will then be able to apply his general knowledge to the problems of his time...
...I do not think that the United States has the right or the duty to interfere in the world for any other purpose than our own national interest...
...Essentially I think that if we must have very large conglomerations of students in a single area, then the absolute necessity is to divide them up into a series of colleges, each one with its own direct teaching staff, each one using the general resources of the major university (large-scale scientific apparatus, libraries, etc...
...The problem of the university is through the humane disciplines to make capable human beings, knowing the tradition of their civilization, skilled in the dialectic arts of reasoning and thought, who then will go out into the world and apply themselves to problems...
...They exist to create better human beings...
...And they may very well, imless we have the sense to challenge them and challenge them fast, face us with a Vietnam or worse in the Middle East...
...There are many welfarist, liberal, semi-socialist modifications of our capitalist system, but we are certainly fundamentally a capitalist system, still, and in no fundamental sense a socialist one or anything like the communist one...
...M E Y E R : I would say that there are two great problems facing our society...
...n inhabits...
...M E Y E R : In Poland, the reaction — in the sense of movement back toward serious Soviet influence, toward more serious and deeper Soviet influence — has proceeded apace for the last half dozen years...
...The Board of Trustees, long concerened about the evil consequences of the "publish or perish" syndrome, has compiled a list of ten books that they adjudge as 1.) catering to prurient interest, 2.) violating community standards, and 3.) bereft of redeeming social importance...
...It m a y take many different forms in many different situations, but there is an underlying, fundamental good and truth toward which all human beings should strive...
...Rule China out...
...I would say that the college Ph.D...
...and 10...
...4.) Percy Bysshe Shelley's In Defence of Virility...
...6.) Jonathon Edward's A n Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion Respecting that Freedom of the Will Which Is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency...
...M E Y E R : Fundamentally...
...W e should long since have secured such areas where we have serious power...
...M E Y E R : Obviously, and it's not a particularly original thought on m y part, there is a sharp split between liberalism as it has been dominant these past thirty years or so and the new left...
...M E Y E R : I believe a trained student of this kind will know on the basis of a knowledge of history, that problems exist in the world...
...Tyrrell: Well sure we are...
...It has been a civilizational entity which fell to pieces in the last part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century...
...Tyrrell: Yes, because the elements of the university lean so heavily on each other in attending to their vested interests...
...Tyrrell: A nation like China which has historically been in competition with Russia — you actually believe that these people can come together in the brotherhood of communism...
...M E Y E R : Because there is no such thing as a human discipline of eliminating poverty in Harlem...
...Tyrrell: Well, we are headed towards the Russian economic system right now, are we not...
...Universities do not exist to solve problems...
...It is in this sense unimportant...
...The Negro people of the United States are in per capita income better off than any other people, outside of white America, who have ever lived now, or at any other time, in any period of the world's history...
...M E Y E R : No...
...W e speak in terms of control of the three major centers of power of the world — the Soviet Union, Western Europe and the United States...
...As though by destroying, somehow suddenly something good could come of it...
...All the way from the Indian Ocean through the Mediterranean we should have alliances with those forces willing to fight communism — Israel, South Africa, Rhodesia, Spain, (Continued on Page 13) questions of Judeao-Christian heritage...
...M E Y E R : I would hardly say the Soviet Union has lost influence in Czechoslovakia...
...M E Y E R : I think the advantage of the war to the new left has been to cause discontent among a large number of moderate students...
...M E Y E R : Well I don't see it...
...It controls Czechoslovakia...
...The problems of grapes in California...
Vol. 3 • August 1969 • No. 1
