The Superfluous Anarchist
Grant, James
Book Review The Superfluous Anarchist by Michael Wreszin Brown University Press, $8.50 Of Albert Jay Nock's ideas it may justly be said that the statement almost always survived the...
...The enormous and increasingly refined popularity of the Marx Brothers, for example, is often confused with a longing for the thirties, but the Marx Brothers thrive on their own crazy excellence which is separable from our feelings about the time when they performed...
...We know this is true, just as we also know that only from the comfort and safety of marriages and families, do we pine for that scarred gym floor, streamers dangling from both baskets, blue celle-phane taped to the spotlights, and Flora in our arms...
...Any citizen who has given a moment's thought to the demands of the women and of the black militants realizes that their demands would tear a community apart...
...In short, nostalgia does for us what history cannot...
...HOWE (continued from page 18) must be eliminated...
...No order could have been better worded to ensure everlasting mediocrity...
...Pottinger has tried to deny OCR's responsibility for the most extreme cases, but in an unusually equivocal manner: "while HEW does not endorse quotas, I feel that HEW has no responsibility to object if quotas are used by universities on their own initiative...
...OCR, of course, never wants it to appear that its policies are degrading "academic excellence" or violating the principles of merit or qualification...
...The Superfluous Anarchist, though successful in placing Nock within a tradition of political thought, stumbles in its treatment of AJN the economic thinker...
...Variations of this idea of immediate quotas are now being adopted by an increasing number of universities...
...How, except for the degree of subtlety, is this formulation to be distinguished from nostalgia...
...No one who has ever seen the charlatans of women's liberation in action can imagine them ever being satisfied or pleased with anything...
...Still, even if the nostalgic impulse is insincere, there must be something we seek to get out of it...
...Nostalgia is, in its heart of hearts, the desire for innocence, and our laughter with Chaplin or Harpo is a kind of innocent longing...
...The next minute a cop gives him a ticket, and Harpo, in return and simultaneously, writes out a ticket for the cop...
...Nostalgia, so used, becomes a form of absolution, an ideal form because the pain it causes is merely charming...
...Bella Abzug, M.C., bellows through the halls of Congress like the water buffalo she resembles...
...are gaining a new respectability...
...Upon investigation, OCR must be substantively convinced that the non-minority candidate is indeed superior by a sizable margin...
...Thoreau had said things similar in his commentaries on death...
...Can you even imagine Bella Abzug ever cooing in contentment or aglow with happiness...
...But the director regarded these former successes as frivolous, and sought to make a movie about tramp life in America instead...
...For years I 'sweat with agony' at the sight of a Liberal," he confessed in his Memoirs, "as Commodore Trunnion did at the sight of an attorney...
...Each in his own way would bring us down...
...Academic excellence," in spite of OCR's protestations, means exactly what it says: "excellence" as it is interpreted by the "academic" institution...
...Don McLean's "American Pie" song is also in earnest which is why it is not nostalgic, despite its wealth of allusions to rock 'n roll...
...By means of a similar ploy, OCR has ruled that women or minority candidates must always be chosen over a man or non-minority candidate with "equal" qualifications...
...These are the gifts nostalgia bears, but they are not what they appear, not the occasional day dream which lightens our present burdens, and not the handsome hobbyhorse of our young imaginations...
...Scenes of Fred Astair steering Ginger Rogers around great marble ballrooms or Edward Everett Horton's puffy agitation over the decline of elegance are images which exist both in their own right and in the theatrical conception of an era...
...It is on the question of intellectual evolution that Mr...
...But the difference between nostalgia and art is not simply the difference between the quality of reminiscence in high and low culture...
...Others are the ritualistic liberals and the romantic rightists...
...Larscham...I have examined your dossier...
...Doors are closed...
...A host of derivative axioms and prejudices lace his writing-the inherent incompetence of the state, the wastefulness of newspaper reading, the hardiness of bureacracy, the soundness of Lloyd George's single-tax theories, and the insufferability of liberals...
...For those black families with heads under 25, their incomes were 113 percent of white...
...And proving the validity of a departmental requirement - to an OCR official who often knows nothing about scholarship or research in the field - can be a difficult task...
...It is only a matter of time before they demand that the federal government give them a state in the South...
...There is a greater difference between Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, and the man of the crowd, than there is between the man of the crowd and the higher anthropoids," he wrote...
...It brings back the best, the golden oldies, but does not bring us back to the rest...
...unions are closed to people of color...
...It is very impressive indeed, and I wish I could invite you to come for an interview...
...and because it need not breach the autonomous standards of decentralized, independent professions...
...Inside, once again, are the armies of the nightmare...
...The venerable goals of the civil rights movement, from the grand old myth of the "melting pot" to the modern-day dream of "integration," are hardly what affirmative action is all about...
...There is little of Nock's personal life...
...But what is not self-evident, even given Nock's writing, is why he took certain positions, and how his thought fit into the mainstream of contemporary opinion...
...Jefferson's ideal of government as decentralized, negative power had become an institution of near absolute positive power, dedicated chiefly to the task of robbing one class for the benefit of another...
...social power and faith in social power diminishing...
...Nock's autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, is often misleading on the first point, and frequently indifferent to the second...
...What it means is that the department - if it has just one professor far less competent than the rest - must hire only women or minority candidates until there is none available who is better qualified than that one, least common denominator...
...Sinful Mortals"' Back in 1964, in the flurry of Senate debate over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Senator Smathers of Florida at one point argued that federal legislation was not the correct approach, that employers should be allowed to end discrimination on their own...
...Freed finally, and returned to Hollywood, he vowed to make comedies forever...
...It is an ominous reversal of an ideology...
...primarily, it seems, because Nock did such a thorough job in keeping his affairs private...
...In "Horse Feathers" Harpo is peacefully sharing a carrot with a horse...
...Equal opportunity," now enforced by law, still did not guarantee "equal results" - which seem to have been, among some reformers, the envisioned ideal...
...And at this moment they have the upper hand...
...I could never read Carlyle," he wrote, "but I admire the man for his cussed-ness and his crusty readiness to say just what he thought about anybody and anything and to put forth his ideas good and hot...
...and bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection...
...In practice, the department is guilty until proven innocent...
...Thus, responding to OCR pressure, Northwestern tersely declared late in 1971 that it will "replace all appointments to the faculty...at a rate of 25 percent women and racial minorities...
...It is not merely the expression of Everyman's desire to return to childhood or blamelessness, nor conversely is every such expression nostalgic...
...As important to Nock was the conviction that most men are simply not human- not in any civilized sense...
...There are some who do not hire solely on the basis of ability...
...So great is their addiction for misery that they not only commit murder and mayhem, but in their reckless criminal acts they invariably bring harm and death to themselves...
...According to the U. S. Bureau of the Census no difference was apparent in 1970 between white and black husband-wife families outside the South where the family head was under 35 years old...
...Today the most promising tool of the missionaries of misery is the quota system...
...The goal of the former is (or was) a compromise between morality and politics, a balance between the ideal of equality and the inherent inequality of society's demands, rewards, acquired responsibilities, and required capabilities...
...Separate but equal," the discriminatory standard of the Jim Crow era, has at last found its cultural descendent in the "equal and opposite" discrimination of HEW...
...It starred Joel McRae as a famous Hollywood director whose fame had been built on turning out a number of successful, sophisticated comedies...
...Worth the price of admission alone is the revelation that Nock was once a liberal...
...Thus, "affirmative action" was born...
...Other subjects, from biography to education, regularly lured him into print (his Jefferson and The Theory of Education in the United States still stand as minor classics), but it was the state that struck Nock as the key to history's puzzle...
...Mencken died a practicing Baptist or that Burke once supported the French Revolution could be no more reassuring to those who occasionally stray from the true path...
...Mussolini's dictum, "Everything for the State...
...It does not suggest the desire to return to a particular time as much as it contemplates the whole question of the passage of time, and of one's passage through it...
...Yet what must be considered OCR's most ingenious and extreme tactic to date, though now it is no longer used, was an interpretation of a Labor Department order which required "universities to reject male and non-minority applicants who might have better credentials than female and minority applicants so long as the latter have qualifications better than the least qualified person presently employed by a department...
...If, as many OCR supporters would claim (though officially, HEW disavows such support), overcompensatory quotas are necessary to make up for "past injustices" to mi norities, then what racial or ethnic vengeance cannot be made legitimate under the mandate of affirmative action - say, on the scale of German domestic policy in the 1930s...
...Wreszin's book is proof that Nock's stricture against biography-it is far better to read what someone wrote than to read what someone else wrote about him, he said-should be taken with a grain of salt...
...We find this sense in Joyce and Wordsworth, but nothing nearly so important in nostalgia...
...It is a common tendency among reformers to judge progress toward an ideal by what they envision will be the most tangible results of such progress...
...The law of diminishing returns taught Nock that mass education is a pipe dream...
...Why compete when the state can impose a tariff...
...Among the less radical advocates of affirmative action, who are convinced that subjective, "clubhouse," "old boy" recruitment policies are responsible for departmental discrimination, the answer appears to be less personal, and more uniform, strictly credential-based evaluation procedures...
...For American universities, OCR's affirmative action program is an overt attempt to reshape the internal standards of excellence that have sustained and nourished the academic community for nearly a thousand years...
...it was that the desire for innocence on the part of the hero was not sincere...
...When in doubt - so run the empty-headed strains of this line of reasoning - be democratic...
...These varieties of regeneration and absolution account more than any other element, I think, for the nostalgia boom, particularly for the fact that the boom is ours...
...When Nock erred, it was on the side of hyperbole...
...like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest...
...Among the more radical advocates, nothing really need replace "academic excellence...
...The skeptics of the story were right from the start, and were proven right...
...To the extent that OCR is effective - for better or for worse - this ideal will necessarily lose its age-old authority...
...That situation does not help America...
...Now the black militants live in a society that has goaded itself to bring appreciable justice and material improvement to blacks in an astonishingly short period...
...And if, as Senator Humphrey suggests, we are really dealing with "sinful mortals," well, who is to say what methods are too extreme to alleviate their sorrowful condition...
...But more important than temperament was Nock's unshakable conviction that he understood how the world got where it was, and that he knew where it was going next...
...objectivity" and "neutrality" in em ployment are considered naive...
...proportion-to-population" which is met by means of a "timetable"), but specific and immediately applicable methods for reaching it...
...The goal of the latter is a self-defeating triumph of morality over politics, a triumph which tramples rudely over any competing ideal and can itself ensure only the most un-ideal, delusory, and superficial sort of equality, the numerical "equality of result...
...Joel McRae's craving to participate in tramp life represented the wish to participate in a traditional American freedom dream, and simultaneously to observe and rearrange (direct) the dream...
...racist) standards, because this law demands "action...
...This is child's play, of course, which is exactly what nostalgia encourages...
...They can only interpret "equal opportunity" in terms of numerical results which render the very idea of "opportunity" meaningless...
...These laws taken into account, Nock's prediction for the future was understandably glum: "closer centralization, a steadily growing bureaucracy...
...The state had usurped government...
...Since almost any qualifying test that is given to different categories of the general population (categories based not only on sex or race, but on economic or educational backgrounds, or physical height or weight, or geographic location, or what have you) will yield results that are - to some degree - unequal, the very principle behind OCR's ruling has effectively jeopardized any means of judging merit...
...Wreszin's book is most interesting...
...Indeed some groups of blacks now actually have higher aggregate incomes than their white equivalents...
...The difference between the civil rights movement of the early sixties and the movement of today is not that one is any more or less a moral crusade than the other...
...The heritage of natural rights and individual freedom that every schoolboy knew protected America from tyranny, Nock dismissed as sheer fantasy...
...The response must be to seize the opportunity to translate advocacy into results with a vigor and commitment that will lead the community at large...
...No nation on earth has done more for a minority living within its boundaries...
...but most of the best entertainers or events of a period survive completely outside of their time slots, and our admiration of them is not at all nostalgic, in the meaning of wistful...
...a qualification is assumed to be prejudicial until proven valid and necessary...
...For the civil rights movement, affirmative action is a more conspicuous failure...
...There he began to study his fellow prisoners, and by watching their uproarious joy one night at a cartoon show, he came to realize that these men wanted and needed laughter in their movies, not realism...
...The advantages of this change, that such standards are free from individual bias and easily weighted, if need be, in a minority's favor, seem to outweigh the disadvantages: that such standards inevitably vitiate the very highest levels and less quantifiable modes of achievement...
...The intelligentsia of their world hiss from every pulpit...
...Insofar as it utterly rejects the values and procedures of society at large, it is an elitist and uncompromising principle...
...if they are centrally administrated (which they must be if the quotas are not to contradict each other), they necessarily centralize professional standards...
...The suggestion is that only from the comfort and safety of an Eames chair does one wholeheartedly call out for the camaraderie of the soup lines...
...Good faith" proof of adherence and of belief can only be within you, for, as Pot-tinger gently reminds us, "affirmative action...has a spirit as well as a letter...
...they abridge, to the extent that they are enforced, any other governing principle of participation...
...But Mr...
...nothing outside the State...
...As the cultural aftermath to the war in Southeast Asia will persistently demonstrate, the two qualities of conscience we seek most avidly as a nation are instant innocence and painless guilt...
...The point of the movie was not that cartoons or laughter will out, although some script writer might have thought that was the point...
...Since most departments have one or two such professors, often hired decades ago when the campus was small and money was short, academic senates protested furiously when this order was actually presented to ten universities...
...James Grant ROSENBLATT (continued from page 4) taste of things remain poised a long time...
...Wreszin seems to have realized...
...After Congressman Gerald Ford began pub-licly investigating the complaints, the order was rescinded - despite the reluctance of the OCR hierarchy...
...The same goes for Charlie Chaplin, Gershwin, and others...
...After all, we deserve to be chastized for "sinful" wrongdoings...
...No piece of HEW literature, no advocate of affirmative action can refrain from emphasizing how this law will set an example for the less enlightened, or how it is an improvement on mere deliberation and older (i.e...
...Since I have no information regarding your racial identification, it will only be possible to contact you for a position in the event you are black...
...Sylvia Plath wrote an early poem called the "Eye-Mote" in which she stated, "What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife...
...Senator Humphrey, choosing his words carefully, responded: "how right the senator is...
...Yes, certainly, we want to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear, but only because we are absolutely assured that those days are out of reach...
...Wreszin was left with little to explain...
...The most basic law was that men tend to satisfy their material wants by exploitation (Nock called this the "political means") rather than productive work (the "economic means...
...To be sure, the long term effects of affirmative action in the university are intimately tied up with other current attempts to reform the philosophy and practice of education...
...The State University of New York at Albany recently announced "a policy of one-to-one hiring of minorities affecting all the administrative staff...
...On behalf of a reasonable principle, this crusading, this blending of morality and politics, can be a boon for all of us...
...If there was one thing that the Republic's most delightful critic of statism held in horror-and Nock cherished more prejudices than an eighteenth-century Tory-it was the overcautious phrase...
...They are themselves accorded prodigious attention...
...At the root of Nock's conviction lay the state...
...In other words, it was pure nostalgia, as we know and practice it...
...The past contains a good deal more than golden oldies, and we would think that we were out of our minds if we wanted to relive it all...
...Wreszin has described the intellectual influences that worked on Nock, from the classics to Lloyd George and Ralph Adams Cram, and the twisted path that led him away from progressive liberalism to a genteel anarchism...
...An increasingly popular justification of affirmative action, popular among those who tend to regard all standards - academic or otherwise - as culturally relative, favors "proportion-to-population" quotas for no better reason than that they are at least as fair as any other method...
...Not even the Ku Kluxers caused such intense misery, for at least the high-minded knights were not obsessed with destroying their communities, their nation, and themselves...
...The world was riding for a fall, he warned, for the simple reason that men who could not even run their own households had taken it upon themselves to rule nations...
...For families where both husband and wife worked and where the family heads were under 35, black earnings were 104 percent of white...
...Only the past is immortal," said Delmore Schwartz...
...Why suffer lower wages when the state can decree unions inviolable...
...When, however, we have gone as on or as up as we can or care to, we do look back, partly because we are secure enough to know that we won't actually fall back by doing so, and partly because we may be feeling more than a little guilty about the ruthless-ness and thrust of our forward motion...
...Yet has any of this propitiated the ladies of liberation...
...we often cry out for a slogan or a law that will force our neighbors to behave in accord with widely accepted ideals...
...A taste for cussedness was part of what led Nock to the positions he defended during the later, and better-known, libertarian phase of his career...
...After pages of evidence documenting Nock's activities as a muckraking journalist, he has concluded that Nock, prior to World War I, wanted to be known only as a "good liberal who helped the cause along...
...This tendency, along with the disappointment, cynicism, and frustration it engenders, was the precursor of the affirmative action principle...
...Some grew wiser, trimmed their expectations, and accepted the inevitable inertia of cultural change...
...It too wants back what was, but under specific and deliberate conditions...
...It was the wish to retrieve a condition of freedom and carelessness apart from any cognizance of responsibility, and at the same time to be able to delimit, or give order to that freedom solely in personal terms...
...To explain the point, he set out a handful of laws accounting for the yawning divergence between theory and practice in American politics...
...How does one go about passing judgement not on an in dividual, but on a group, or distributing rewards not according to voluntary be havior, but according to some determinist rule of tribal worth...
...The undeniable usefulness of Mr...
...It is also attended by the kind of abstract sadness which nostalgia always reduces to vivid particulars...
...Again, this rests the onus of guilt and the burden of proof on the department if, in choosing between two candidates of proximate quality, it happens to choose the "wrong" way...
...Yet the militants grumble about all sorts of invisible and imaginatively concoted injustices...
...and the old bogeys - double or triple standards, quotas, racial inventories, etc...
...To ask where the snows of yesteryear are is a philosophic question...
...But the trouble is that these idealistic pleadings are not followed by some sinful mortals...
...What is taking its place...
...There was a wonderful movie made in the late thirties called "Sullivan's Travels...
...There is a difference between bona fide nostalgia and the appreciation of things past in our popular art as well...
...If possible, they will leave the ideology of merit intact...
...Nostalgia, too, is emotion recollected in tranquility, the affectionate and painful remembrance of things past...
...Though many have no visible means of support aside from the charitable grants of large white foundations, and from various government swindles, they are all quite as removed from poverty as any other upwardly mobile entertainers...
...Wreszin offers a different view...
...She is not humming or sighing in this, but in desperate earnest...
...Wreszin might have given more attention to Nock's conversion to laissez-faire, and to which thinkers helped lead him there...
...Robert Nisbet has recently pointed out in his splendid article on the thirties for the Key Reporter, that nostalgia seems peculiarly to be the phenomenon of an affluent age...
...Inevitably, letters sent from universities to male, non-minority candidates have come to include, as a matter of course, some rather awkward phraseology : "Dear Mr...
...Due largely to the principle of affirmative action, the arguments of ten and fifteen years ago that participation should be alloted on the basis of merit alone without regard to race, creed, or color, now are derelict and abandoned...
...How is the ubi sunt motif to be distinguished, or Wordsworth's poetic method...
...It is the sincere expression of what is at base an insincere desire...
...But on behalf of an unreasonable principle, the whole effort has tragic consequences...
...the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income...
...And a major tenet of Nock's economics-that money is a contrivance which often obscures the simple act of exchange between buyer and seller-is far sounder than Mr...
...From this follows the durability of the welfare state in a nation supposedly peopled by lovers of liberty...
...The cultural barriers to instant participation were more insurmountable, more complicated, more intrinsically bound up with other, fundamental societal values than had once been imagined...
...In fact, consider both species of militant...
...At present, however, the department is concentrating on the appointment of a woman...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Instead of finding any coherent general statements in nostalgia, we get chowder parties down by the seashore every fourth of July...
...The discovery that H.L...
...Hardly had the abortion decision been handed down before the whole mob began shrieking for lesbian marriages, the need to treat pregnancy as a disease, and a spate of legal changes that would remake America into the largest madhouse in the world...
...Book Review The Superfluous Anarchist by Michael Wreszin Brown University Press, $8.50 Of Albert Jay Nock's ideas it may justly be said that the statement almost always survived the exaggeration, and that literary grace, which never failed either, occasionally outshone both...
...In just over a decade America has moved from a nation wherein the black minority's income had practically stagnated far behind that of the white majority to a state where almost all blacks are improving their conditions faster than whites...
...Advocates of civil rights could see that the difficult but equitable progress of racial "neutrality" would reach complete fruition not in months or years, but perhaps in decades...
...In fact, it is the opposite of nostalgic, in the sense that it arises out of sustained critical comparisons...
...Our affluence is, after all, an emblem of our faith in progress, in an onward-and-up-ward mobility whose principal, and national, caveat has been "Don't look back...
...But Humphrey's version is of particular interest because it expresses what was and still is a vital animus within the civil rights movement: a desire to uplift man and to presume an "idealistic" insight into his prejudices...
...Then, after some conventional mishaps, including the standard temporary amnesia, he wound up in a Georgia chain gang...
...Others grew desperate, and transformed earlier civil rights' rhetoric into iron-clad principles that promised - above all else - immediate results...
...The difference is simply this: the movement of yesteryear worked for the reasonable principle of "non-discrimination," while the vanguard of today's movement works for the unreasonable and now discriminatory principle of the "affirmative action" quota...
...When the chairman of "the Graduate Department of Religious Studies at one Ivy League University tried to explain to OCR representatives that knowledge of Hebrew and Greek was a standard prerequisite for candidacy, he was told, with characteristic bluntness: "then end these old fashioned programs that require irrelevant languages...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) their babies to the sword if they will but observe certain standards...
...Dear Mr...
...because it recognizes that "equal opportunity" as a concept only has meaning when applied to particular cases of employment...
...Dear Mr.- ...all unfilled positions in the university must be filled by females or blacks...
...Insofar as it contradicts any traditional or common-sense grounds for institutional participation, it is a mysterious principle...
...But the ladies' liberationists and the black militants are not the only advocates of misery at work today...
...No matter how thickly they are cushioned by platitudes of goodwill, "idealistic pleadings," given the force of law, can turn into genuine repression - when no other consideration seems "idealistic" enough to refute them...
...Each in his own way will work for the repeal of the Bill of Rights...
...Earnestness and desperation are anathemas to nostalgia, and yet nostalgia does seek innocence...
...Even if we accept the notion that it is govern ment's responsibility to readjust institu tional standards so that social justice may be meted out to citizens on the basis of race or sex, how are we to determine the ideal readjustment...
...There is, in the reclamation of the past, the claiming of a kind of eternity, the achievement of an afterworld in the shape of the world already gone...
...Michael Wreszin's The Superfluous Anarchist is an able and learned account of Nock's thought...
...Such language, of course, was typical of the civil rights' esprit of the early sixties...
...That Nock, the scourge of both collectivists and authoritarian conservatives from the twenties to the early forties, was not born with a curse on his lips for the state and its works is one of the surprises awaiting the reader of Michael Wreszin's excellent intellectual biography...
...They simply want to distort and reorient these principles so that universities can legitimately accomplish the goals of affirmative action...
...This is not idle spec ulation...
...There are, however, special moments in the work of performers of genius which do become nostalgia.Thesemoments have to do both with the nature of the performances and with what we perceive to be the characters of the people involved, and you can tell when they occur by the extra warmth with which a modern audience greets them...
...nothing against the State," had become world law, though sanitized for American consumption by slogans like "the New Deal...
...The twentieth-century decline in cultural taste he attributed in large measure to mass literacy, reasoning that in culture as in finance, the bad drives out the good...
...Simple "non-discrimination" still did not mean that just as many minorities as non-minorities could legitimately participate in every institution...
...But if worst comes to worst, OCR is fully prepared to pressure the university to adopt not only a final, ideal goal (e.g...
...In order to do it right, he ran away from his girl (Veronica Lake) and cohorts who had told him it couldn't be done, and disguised himself as a hobo...
...The type of innocence longed for in nostalgia is special, indeed is ail-American down to its deepest roots...
...They are perpetual grousers and busybodies...
...What we seem to find and celebrate in such a moment - as we do with Chaplin battling the Machine Age - is the kind of romantic, or anti-authoritarian expression which is very much at the center of nostalgia...
...positions are closed...
...Do you ever expect to see black militants helping little old ladies across the street...
...Non-discrimination," the original purpose of the Civil Rights Act and once the slogan of a host of admirable legislators and civil rights groups, is a reasonable principle because its approach is flexible in practice...
...Throughout the sixties, especially after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it became obvious to many members of the civil rights movement that full minority participation in all areas of society could not be brought about as soon as they had hoped...
...Indeed, to the uninitiated, it is esoteric...
...Their rage against America is comprehensive and inextinguishable...
...There are already indications that the principle of affirmative action in the last five or ten years has helped to increase competitive animosity between different races, sexes, and ethnic groups, and has helped politicize and institution alize the bounderies between such groups...
...We believe in yesterday, as the song says, just as long as we can exercise control over the objects of faith...
...If ever you doubted my thesis that there are elements in America driven by a powerful afflatus to bring all of society to a state of egalitarian anguish, remember these unhappy racists...
...State power and faith in State power increasing...
...Thanks to the clarity of Nock's prose and thought, Mr...
...Their ancestors were the lemon sucking dames of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and their contemporaries are those loud mouths of racial bigotry, the black militants...
...To anyone who believed in the healing power of the state, Nock, in his later years, offered no quarter...
...It seems reasonable, then, that if nostalgia is a consequence of affluence, it may also be a product of the kind of progressivism attached to it...
...If so I have failed to perceive it...
...Affirmative action quotas, on the other hand, are by nature inflexible...
...It is a hasty, fervent, thoughtless attempt, brimming with tragic consequences...
...because it respects other legitimate, institutional principles - excellence, efficiency, profit, to name a few...
...There is a distinction, of course, and it hinges on the question of seriousness...
...Pittman...This disapproval in no way reflects upon your professional preparation or specific background...The basis for disapproval was primarily that the position...requires certain qualifications regarding the overall profile of the institution...
...Again, Pottinger says it best: "Clearly, when the issue comes close to home, the academic community's response should not be to refuse to participate, or even to ask whether it should participate...
...The state, controlled by men of the crowd, simply institutionalized the dominance of the subhuman masses over the elite...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
