The Philosopher's Disease

...The "unfettered mind" is attached to a fettered being and, if not a soul, at least a series of noncognitive drives and feelings...

...it has always been there...

...In the great state of California which has one of the most extensive public higher education systems in the country, over 50% of the students at the institutions of higher education come from the top 25% of the families by income...

...And your personal preference, unless you can link it to some higher value than your opinion versus mine, is not an adequate basis on which to build a peaceful, functioning society...

...We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an over-greedy and violent desire, it may become vicious...

...All that I would ask is that, while we await Justice Future's verdict, we do not totally ignore the learned utterances of that veteran if imperfect pleader, Counselor Past...

...The poor old sticks are blindered by heir own one-dimensional paper truths," luncombe would chuckle over his randy, "even when they believe they're he freest of spirits...

...This potential for cruelty, for intolerance (whether of belief or disbelief) and for violence seems, on the basis of human experience, to lie within every society and every individual...

...Having begun with Buncombe, let me end with de Tocqueville who, describing another sort of ideological wrangle, wrote that, "After a lot of shouting, we both agreed to leave the verdict to the future, that enlightened and just judge who, unfortunately, always arrives too late...

...Without going into forbid detail, there were two key sympams: an insanely tenacious clinging to ne-phase answers to multi-phased quesions ("a philosophic mania for skeleton eys," Ben called it), and an inherent inbility or unwillingness to recognize the oncrete consequences that would follow teral application of abstract ideals...

...Miss Efron, for example, finds hard-line Conservatives odious (perhaps rightly so) in their pliant acceptance of varying amounts of repression, segregation, corporal punishment, censorship, antisedition measures, and other societal curbs, curves, preferences, and bounds...

...Now, if we were all purely cognitive creatures—if we thought out or could be conditioned (an unlibertarian concept) to think out our problems without acting on the impulses of anger, greed, jealousy, love, whimsy, or even an arbitrary preference for beefsteak over soymeal, this would all make perfect sense...

...Anyone who has ever had the least Jimpse of the malice, pettiness, and ca;als roiling in the average university phi)sophy department should thank God hat there never has been, and probably Lever shall be, such a thing as a nation of .hilosophers...

...Life itself is a perilous journey...

...I would go a bit further: it will sometimes be twisted beyond recognition or actually crushed to death...

...were infected [and] we corrupt by touching things that in themselves are fair and good...

...Tawney, and Anthony Crosland, this is not because I think them more amusing than their wilder sidekicks but because I am sure they and their innumerable followers have had more influence...

...Some of the very values that humane (though they might wince at the adjective) Libertarians claim to hold dear are negations of their core belief...

...they are actual elitists posing as abstract egalitarians...

...His man was Montaigne, a fellow who withdrew from the world only to view it more clearly, and then only after an extended participation in war, lust, politics, passion, and the rest of that long gauntlet of experiences that makes life interesting, dangerous, and fathomable...

...if you prefer, end of disconnected ramble...

...Imposed social norms among men, like toilet training among infants,represent a limited infringement on the individual freedom to "do one's own thing" in order to prevent a greater evil or bigger mess from piling up...

...There is no program which is so perverse in its distributional effects...

...This sense of inferiority (combined with shared customs) allowed Europe, specifically England, a powerful influence over American life...

...the individual mind that ignores it is not unfettered, but unhinged...

...And so to bed...

...I could go on and on along this line, but I conclude by urging you to be a little bit more skeptical of some of these myths that are going around, to be skeptical of the myth of the robber baron, the myth of the Great Depression, the myth that there is an underlying demand for government services, the myth that government can spend money at nobody's expense, and the myth that government has benefited the poor at the expense of the rich...

...That may be Libertarian...

...Five percent come from the bottom 25...

...Colin Welch The English Crisis: I. The Intellectuals A Prefatory Note from the Editor Since—roughly speaking—the first quarter of the last century, a powerful sense of cultural inferiority has crept into American realms of influence...

...Aside from the protection of property, though, she urges us to jettison the works...

...But we do not...

...Buncombe had an odd but plausible exlanation for it all...

...On the other hand, if the Libertarian concern for these rights, justices, or humane gestures is, indeed, only lip service, then the worst we have heard about them is true...

...There is a bestial side of the human character that rises with equal virulence to the summons of Left or Right, Priest or Philosophe...

...even the most rude and earthy, the least doctrinaire, the most pragmatic, greedy, unreflective, and unprincipled, as well as the most woolly and sentimental, of its active members were often drawn into its service by their teachings, directly or at one remove...

...The pohe Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 9 litical system that ignores this is illogical...

...beyond that it means force...

...I don't blame lem...

...We have been moving in a direction in which we have an increasingly limited control over our own lives and that movement has been nourished by a series of arguments which, quite simply, are untrue...

...What follows is the first essay in this series...

...therefore, it does not...

...At the least, this means compulsory indoctrination...

...They are still the brains of the ruling Labour Party;they have supplied its dominant prejudices and reflexes as well as the broad mass of its reasoning...

...The great scandal of our times, in my opinion, is government expenditure on higher schooling...

...Spock has nothing further to contribute to this discussion, Miss Efron does...

...He called it the Phi)sopher's Disease...

...If you and I are fools enough to lake it to their advantage to subsist on 'elfare rather than work, they would be )olish not to take advantage of it...

...None of these things would exist without some sense of tradition, some sense of oneness with a past and a future that we will never be a physical part of and that hold no Libertarian IOU's drawn against our personal accounts...

...The business of organized society—the only reason why man, from the beginning, has always tolerated the imposition of some degree of societal control, has been based on the common sense, consensus recognition of this fundamental problem...

...There remain the weaknesses of Doctrinaire Libertarianism...

...only their own personal preference...

...It appears to come from the natural promptings of an embittered and unlettered heart...

...As a crony of Ben Buncombe's, I would be the last to suggest that there is a non-libertarian, nonconservative panacea—what Ben was so fond of calling a "philosophical skeleton key" to all human ills...

...The Philosopher's Disease • I believe it was the late Ben Buncombe, hat worldly-wise old British journalist, vho once remarked that the only place ,ne is likely to find the Philosopher's tone is in the gallbladder of a bilious 'edant...

...organized society, living beyond subsistence withan eye to something more than naked ego gratification, is even more demanding...

...And, even as Miss Efron kicked the stuffing out of the Tory mentality, she exposed a charming but vulnerable Libertarian Achilles' heel...

...Take the Libertarins_ think about it for a moment...

...It's a bad program not beause it gives money to the poor but beause it produces poor people, because it ncourages people to be on welfare in-read of being on wages...

...End of sermon...

...In trying to describe the intellectual I am daunted to find how much of my work was done for me nearly forty years ago by George Orwell, one of the breed himself for all his percipience and humanity, in The Road to Wigan Pier...

...While Dr...

...And yet it is precisely the products of these cumulative individual concessions and individual contributions to a larger whole that make life livable—families, friendships, books, monuments of the past, and visions of the future...

...Purist conservatives and purist libertarians alike are all too likely to smother their ideals with a lethal ardor...

...no, it is either a youthful snob Bolshevik or, more typically, a prim little white-collar job man, possibly a teetotaller or vegetarian of nonconformist background, and with no intention of forfeiting his social position: both "unsatisfactory or even inhuman types...

...when ou boil down all the Libertarian fustian bout abolishing moral, ethical, and traitional restraints—all of the socio-reliious dogma of the past—what it comes 3 is the most dogmatic (and self-contraictory) absolute of all: 'Thou shalt ave no Commandments.' Why, Ayn .and and her acolytes might just as well ave graven their words on tablets of tone...

...And, looking around us, it certainly shows no sign of abating today...

...although she attaches a codicile to this mental Emancipation Proclamation: to wit, legal protection of most accumulated capital gains...

...Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...In admirably stating the case against repressive Conservatism she revealed an almost sentimental Libertarian faith in what she called the "unfettered mind...

...And if I pay a lot of attention to comparatively dull dogs like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Strachey, R.H...

...What I do mean is a person who thinks himself to be moved primarily or solely by his intellect (which may of course be very feeble or very powerful), who regards himself as an intellectual and makes a living thereby or, unable to do so, is influenced by those who do, in the columns of the New Statesman and elsewhere...

...Spock, Edith Efron, or anyone else may sensibly argue about the degree of imposed control justified in either case—but the need for some degree of imposed control is self- evident...

...Yet dimly behind such outbursts we are aware of the prompting and blessing of some remote grey ideologue, half forgetten yet still potent...

...it certainly has nothing to do with individual freedom or consent...

...And yet these are the things that we really cherish...

...But onetheless, I have a great deal more ympathy for that program than for al-lost any other, because it's about le only one that really contributes people in lower income classes rather than to the people who pay the taxes...

...The same gentleman once put he lie to Plato in a single sentence...

...We shall be publishing this book with Doubleday later this year, and the essays within it will appear in the New York Times Magazine, Encounter, and other magazines as well as The Alternative...

...Ever since, I have had rouble taking The Republic quite as seriusly as perhaps I should...

...The "progressive" ways of the English have been pointed to throughout this century by Americans intent on conducing America along the English path, and so successful have these 'Progressive" Americans been that today most of our government expenditures go toward the support of institutions very similar to the social democratic institutions of England...

...RET The fish, so the French say, decays from the head first...

...By "intellectual" I do not mean an intelligent person, who need not be either left-wing or strictly an intellectual...

...The excesses of Free Thinkers in power—during the Terror in France and the twentieth-century revolution in Mexico, to cite only two examples —were remarkably similar to those of the Inquisition, even, in some cases, down to the torture and burning of victims...

...Despite the fact that only one of those I have mentioned, Mr...

...Crosland, is still alive, Britain is still governed by them, perhaps increasingly so...

...Take away all religious, traditional, and social "fetters" on our minds, according to Miss Efron's optimistic brand of Libertarianism, and all will be well, or at least better...

...The typical socialist is not for him a ferocious worker with a raucous voice...

...For an analysis of the weaknesses of the Traditionalist Conservative case, at least at its most extreme, I heartily recommend her "Libertarian Challenge" which appeared in the October 1975 issue of this publication...

...For when a Libertarian expresses the belief that"The national government should guarantee that all adult citizens, except for criminals and the insane, should have the right to vote," and then adds the qualifier that "people should never be given the right to vote in a manner that would violate any individual's rights," what he or she is really saying is that there is a moral absolute, though Libertarians can give no moral or spiritual genesis to justify it...

...And, anyone who believes in this is not really a Libertarian...

...Call it the darker side of human nature, original sin, or anything else you prefer...

...With Montaigne, Buncombe warned that it is "as if our sense of feeling...

...Such people standing as they do in our recent history predominantly on the Left, I expect the epithet "left-wing" to be understood wherever I use the word "intellectual"—and "British" too, for I am not qualified to write of others...

...When I want to be demagogic, I say that's a system under which the people in Watts send the children from Beverly Hills to college...

...In the absence of a higher moral priority, we are all reduced to a world in which the philosophy which governs is the philosophy commanding the bigger battalions, the view which can muster the superior show of real or implicit force...

...But—and here is the heart of the Libertarian dilemma—unless "humane" Libertarians are only paying lip service to combating these real or supposed evils, they will have to resort to massive doses of statist, antilibertarian intervention to halt them...

...Alas, today England's social democratic institutions appear to be terminally ill and before ours fall into a similar condition, we at The Alternative decided to publish a book on the "Crisis of Social Democracy in England" with especial concern for the lessons that decline holds for England's prodigal son...

...I hasten to add that the venerable Ben At the same disdain for hidebound Conervatives who worship an abstract kind f "freedom of our fathers," hopelessly ntangled in a web of ritual hocuspocusand stale rhetoric...

...Orwell wonders about the motives of 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976...

...This is what justifies any study of the British left-wing intellectual...

...or "Make the rich squeal...

...Some oaf shrieks, "Shoot the bosses...