The Inverted Conscience of the Intellectuals

...Reason does not counsel resistance to seduction...

...Roche does not question the legal right of radicals to appeal to the Fifth Amendment...

...First fact: There was not just Professor X. There were three of them Professors X, Y and Z. All three refused to testify before the Velde Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment...

...But there was the corruption in New York City and the mounting mess of injustice in the nation...

...There is a vote of censure against the administration of North Pacific College, passed by an overwhelming majority...

...However, Professors Y and Z did speak with frankness to the faculty committee and the trustees of the college...

...Moreover, this is not happening in the faculty of some backwoods, jerkwater institution...

...One might hesitate to charge the administration of such a college with illiberality...

...make it antiseptic to the point of sterility: That would be a pure intelligence, would it not...

...There is a piece of unfinished business from the previous year...

...I'll tell the world...

...They come together again for a play-reading at the home of mutual friends...

...it suggests that it might be sensible to succumb...

...There was, however, one big moment in the annual proceedings when, with a little effort of the imagination, one might have taken pride in the stout hearts of one's academic colleagues...

...This failure to think was what she could forgive herself...

...Separate intelligence from the warmth of emotion, from the radiance of faith, from the ardor of passion, from the entanglements of tradition...

...their lives are public because they have made themselves public persons...

...It is in Mary McCarthy's New Leeds that people can enact the drama of which the title may be A Charmed Life...

...And a smart fellow would sooner offend the doctrinaire conservatism of a trustee than the doctrinaire liberalism of his department chairman...

...Nevertheless, the society does not hesitate to assert its will to protect one of its rights and to bring home a sense of moral responsibility to others...

...Perhaps it is intelligence which abdicates itself...

...Apparently, this is a question of freedom of conscience...

...California...

...It could be only the cowardly who would wish to conceal their ballots...

...And if they're already public, then since when did good literary criticism follow the code of the gentleman that you may see a lot of things which you can't rightly notice or mention...

...For all of them, secrecy and privacy can only mean stultification...

...Reason has no particular concern for the ignorant husband...

...Because, in the first place, who made all these things public if it wasn't the poet himself, by the way he acted...

...For a moment, Gus Claessens just sat there and looked at me...

...And it is reason which applies Kant's categorical imperative to the situation: "All the while, the moral part of Martha knew that she would have to have an abortion because all her inclinations were the other way...

...So there was a vote by raised arms, with some abstaining altogether, but with a tremendous majority in favor of the motion to censure and with the open dissenters numbering less than the fingers of one hand...

...Here the mood is created for what is to follow...

...more to the point, if Dylan Thomas was in the heroic tradition of poets, he didn't care anything about the privacy of his life, but meant it boldly to be a public life, for better or for worse, for beauty or for ugliness, come salvation or damnation...

...Still at New Leeds, with a second wife, is Miles, the first husband from whom Martha ran away...

...both the hero and the villain are right and wrong, each in his own way...

...This latter-day, loose-minded liberal no longer lives a life in society...

...The New Leeds of Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life, a recent meeting of the Society of American Scholars, something about the private life of Dylan Thomas, and the clear and penetrating eye of Gus Claessens looking at me across a desk in a shabby office of the Socialist party all pile up on and interpenetrate one another...

...Third fact: The faculty committee of this college, unlike the trustees, voted overwhelmingly to retain Professor X in his post, even though he refused to testify to them...

...yet, "what I am suggesting is that by taking this way out they waive their moral status as radicals...

...To some of us...

...But it is clear that Mary McCarthy's cool reason has a detachment which lifts it above the superficial sensibleness and rationality of the people in her story, and that she knows enough about logic to recognize irony and contradiction when they appear...

...Just what is going on, one asks, when scholars contemn truth and liberty and abdicate intelligence...

...There's no room in this outfit for pious panty-waists...

...We affirmed the inviolability of the academic conscience in its superiority both to courtesy and to consistency...

...She slows down and draws over to the right side of the road...

...Let us be clear about what is being said and done here...

...It is the annual meeting of the Society of American Scholars...

...But I leave the last word to Mary McCarthy, precisely because her total perspective must be quite different from my own...

...A part of that look in Claessens's eye was doubting and sardonic, and seemed to say: "What are you doing here, college boy...

...Dylan Thomas in America, in which he reported the hair-pullings and the chasings and the roisterings of the poet, along with other human features and failings...

...Reason does not disapprove of adultery...

...Only don't expect any gold medals for anything...

...He is a solipsist for whom truth, beauty and goodness exist only as secretions in his own mind...

...But it can be, and it is...

...The next day, our pictures came out in all the papers, and, what with the YMCA secretary who had a big hole in his forehead on account of a crude sinus operation, we looked like a fine collection of plug-uglies instead of a lot of nice boys with degrees in arts and philosophy and divinity...

...3. The vanity of reason (although this is not made explicit until later): "You take up a doubting posture...

...It was intimated that this was the only way to protect some members of the group from a vindictive college administration...

...There are three elements: 1. The absurdity of religion: "People need' religion to 'deepen their awareness' or give them "tragic irony' the way I 'need' a facial cream to make my life more glamorous...

...We came out courageously in behalf of cowardice...

...And it is a head which gets softer every minute...

...Nobody is really curious because nobody cares what the truth is...

...but reason does care for the proprieties...

...it is not clear how this can be made any part of our official business...

...It is also possible that archaic types like Gus Claessens just don't belong in the modern world any longer, and that what used to be called having the courage of your convictions is out of place in the sinister complexities of pressure polities...

...But Hicks must be right in principle about all these people: the actor, the author, the preacher, the politician, the poet, the prophet and the capitalist...

...2. The relativity of morals: Love is a weakness...

...It is reason, with its respect for the value of truth, which finally convinces her she should have an abortion, since she cannot really know whether the child is John's or Miles's...

...Second fact: Professor X refused to discuss his case not merely before the trustees but even before a committee of the faculty which had been elected by that body to represent it...

...For almost two decades, the papers presented to this society have been demonstrating, on the basis of logical positivism and cultural relativism, that there are no objective values for universal rights of man...

...So I walked into the office of the Socialist party and asked for a red card and offered to pay my dues, so I could be signed up good and proper...

...Martha does the sensible thing...

...Then the critics got into a big hassle as to whether or not this was a violation of the privacy of the poet...

...But I was not thinking: Will they promote me now and give me a raise in salary and maybe make me a full professor on tenure...

...And this, I think, brings us around to Dylan Thomas...

...We declared ourselves publicly in favor of privacy...

...Returning to this community to live is Martha, with her second husband John...

...One wonders only if there could be any affinity between the inverted conscience of New Leeds and the inverted reason of the Society of Scholars...

...So they piled us into the wagon and dumped us each one into a private cell to wait it out where the spigot from which you got your drinking water was right over the howl where you emptied your bowels and your bladder...

...These scholars, whose main business is academic freedom and truth, decide that it is none of their business if a fellow scholar belongs to a group which, whenever it has had the power, has always adulterated truth and aborted liberty...

...One might expect that a society of scholars would be extra anxious to present the truth and the whole truth in a report which was intended to vindicate a martyr to academic freedom and bring censure upon a famous liberal-arts college...

...Don't you know that this isn't a Sunday-school picnic...

...but mostly the dullness of duty and routine...

...The hardest course was the right one: in her experience, this was an almost invariable law...

...When he seems to be fighting for his life, he is in fact preparing to commit suicide...

...While only members could take part in the business meetings, no interested person was ever kept from attending, since there was nothing to hide...

...I try to tell myself that these things can't be...

...Nevertheless, it is amazing the way the liberal has managed to invert himself...

...Now it may be that I am getting unduly excited about all this...

...His moral law has become an immoral law...

...We are defending its freedom not to speak...

...In brief, Professor X refused to be frank with his own peers...

...He can be courageous only in the defense of cowardice...

...And when I got out of there and stood outside and looked back on what they called the Hall of Justice, I knew for just one sharp moment in my life what it felt like to be an anarchist and to wish that someone would put a bomb in my hand...

...then join up with us...

...He still likes to talk about standing on his own two feet, but he is in fact standing on his head...

...December 1955...

...When the court opened, they took us from there and herded us into the bull-pen along with the alcoholics and the pimps and the perverts and the other social outcasts with whom we belonged...

...But the proceedings of free scholars in a democracy have always been out in the open...

...Toward the end of the tale, Martha has at last managed to borrow the money necessary for the abortion which she feels obliged to undergo out of respect both for truth and for morality...

...Then a lot of things happened fast...

...You just ask questions, like a machine...

...For it seems that John Malcolm Brinnin wrote a book...

...We are not defending the freedom of this conscience to speak...

...That night when Miles takes Martha home, because his wife and her husband are away, comes the act of adultery...

...But the other part of the look spoke courage and friendly invitation, and said in effect: "All right, lad...

...Today, we have progressed beyond that...

...It is reason which later points out to her the unforgivable negligence about contraceptives: "She ought to have thought...

...For in this community of actors, authors, artists, lawyers and scholars, people always do the reasonable and the sensible thing...

...Reason recks not of the unborn child that is to be slain...

...Ostensibly, it was for protection against those two monsters, the administration and the trustees...

...Anyway, we took a stand openly to protect the right of one of our fellows not to take a stand openly...

...As I record these words, there boils through my brain a flood of impressions...

...We didn't yet have any New Deal to make it fashionable to be a social radical...

...In a cheerful mood, she is driving home, after twilight, to rejoin her unsuspecting husband...

...This is the blunder: "As the car crashed into her and she heard a shower of glass, she knew, in a wild flash of humor, that she had made a fatal mistake: In New Leeds, after sundown, she would have been safer on the wrong side of the road.' Robert E. Fitch is Professor of Christian Ethics and Dean of the Pacific- School of Religion, Berkeley...

...There'll be some fighting and some fun...

...A committee presents a report, in preparing which there have been some twelve months of inquiry and deliberation...

...but reason, in the name of duty and truth, commands an abortion...

...Indeed, he knows no public truth, but only a private truth...

...Let us borrow authority from John P. Roche, writing in the New Republic: "While the old-style radical stuck out his chin and took his licks, never expecting that the reward for his apostasy would be good fellowship, our non-conformist is hurt when society retaliates for his deviation, for he feels that he deserves a medal...

...There was the time, after the election was over and the powers-that-be were no longer posing as the friend of the common man, when we were helping reorganize the ILGWU and the cops were told to get us off the streets...

...keep it clear, cool and clean...

...Both of them were retained in their academic posts...

...Here reason takes hold of its own tail to swallow it, and freedom at last reaches the end of that long rope with which it will now hang itself...

...But in the academic world the instructors and assistant professors hold full professors and department chairmen more in awe than they do any of the remoter hierarchs...

...A car approaches from the opposite direction...

...And it was what John could not forgive her if he were ever to find out...

...As the time approached for the vote on the motion to censure North Pacific College, the proposal was suddenly made that there be a secret ballot...

...It might be the intelligence of a highly conscious artist and philosopher like Mary McCarthy, whose reason is sufficiently lucid to perceive the suicidal character of the reason of the persons in her novel...

...I'd been thinking hard about it all summer and had finally decided that this was the only thing to do...

...Would we keep on fighting now, would we open wide our mouths and proclaim our gospel wherever we could hire a hall or buttonhole a stranger...

...But you don't really doubt...

...Both in this act and in the abortion that follows reason always prevails...

...if you think you've got the guts for it...

...The report has to do with the case of Professor X, who was fired from the faculty of North Pacific College because he refused to testify before the Velde Committee and appealed to the Fifth Amendment...

...It is reason as a sense of humor which, in the preliminary scuffling on the couch, enables Martha to see that she might as well give in to the assault of her ex-husband, "when she had already laid it on the line for him about five hundred times...

...duty is mere conformity...

...Whether it is meant that the abrupt termination of a charmed life in New Leeds comes through the operation of moral law, the caprice of blind fate, or some weird mixture of the two, I do not know...

...But what could have been the real intent behind the proposal for a secret ballot...

...Is it possible, indeed, that with a secret ballot there might have been fewer abstentions from voting and a much greater number opposed to the motion of censure...

...Certainly none of us was seeking a sanctuary in silence and anonymity: If we had managed to incriminate ourselves in the cause that we believed to be just, we were mighty proud of it...

...And twelve months ought to be time enough to do a thorough job of it...

...For an instant, I wondered what this would do to my job at CCNY...

...In the approved tradition at this session is a brilliant paper which argues the irrelevance of the concept of free will and the vacuity of the concept of moral responsibility...

...The Inverted Conscience of the Intellectuals A phantasmagoria of many elements, from a scholars' meeting to 'A Charmed Life' By Robert E. Fitch In ages past, our fathers fought that a man might be free to speak his mind...

...It is happening in the faculty of a college which in its own region has been pre-eminent as a center of liberal culture, and which over the entire nation has been renowned for high standards of scholarship...

...Now the fight is that a man should be free not to speak his mind...

...Nevertheless, there were three vital facts which did not go into the report, and which could not be learned by the membership of the society until the vote of censure was recorded and the meeting was adjourned...

...Only this voice came from a capitalist, not from a poet...

...He has convictions only about the right to have convictions...

...But I can't help looking at it as Granville Hicks does, if I understand him aright...

...A committee of scholars in a democracy decides that it is irrelevant whether or not one of its colleagues belongs to an organization which puts its members under discipline to subvert all democracy...

...A venal magistrate read us a pious lecture on not disturbing the peace and not blocking traffic, and then was smart enough to give us a suspended sentence...

...Moreover, at a crisis like this, a man should step forward and take a stand for the freedom of his profession...

...Let us see if all this can be sorted into some pattern of coherence...

...it merely disapproves of the failure to use contraceptives...

...Here we are on the eve of 1956, dealing with a case that arose in the summer of 1954, and by this time intelligent folk must have learned a few things...

...I refuse to testify on the ground that my testimony may incriminate me' for a radical was there ever a starker summation of moral bankruptcy...

...It may be that there is no connection between the New Leeds of Mary McCarthy, the Society of American Scholars, and the tender-minded friends of Dylan Thomas...

...Curiously enough, it was only about two decades ago that we were listening to another voice whining about the privacy of its affairs, and saying that no one had any right to meddle in its business, and that it was a vulgar violation of the rights of the individual to argue that such matters were affected with a public interest...

...It is directly upon the recommendation of these professors that all advancement depends...