THE NONSENSE OF FRED RODELL

...Of course, Holmes thinks good thoughts with his blood and Goebbels thinks evil thoughts but, since Holmes denies the existence of good and evil the choice between Holmes and Goebbels has to be made, in the end, by drawing blood...

...Can any man know anything any more surely than Socrates did when he told his judges, "I love you and honor you, but I shall obey God rather than you...

...he and Holmes will both be the better for it...

...And all these Peglers have more morals than a pig, because only moral creatures can be immoral...

...When you ask them why, they get red in the face...

...We hold these truths," but even while we hold them we say that there is no such thing as truth...

...Ernest T. Weir Chairman National Steel Corporation will latch on to a bad one...

...Christian democracy— you may throw Gandhi in there, and me, too, if Gandhi does not object— and Christian democracy alone would have saved man from going where he has gone...

...Neither the Senate nor the People can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice...

...If they have paved the road to hell, they have done it with good intentions, and Holmes will enter the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of some of the people who pass by their thirsting, naked, and hungry brother and say, "Lord, Lord...

...Out of Holmes, and out of his predecessors as far back as Protagoras and Sextus Empiricus, come full-panoplied a procession of young lawyers and lawmakers and judges who say, with Holmes: "The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market...

...if liberty and justice and democracy are rejected in the market, they are false...

...They will not tolerate any social, political, or economic evil and say, "Oh, well, who knows...

...Whose reason...

...In religion he was an agnostic, in philosophy a skeptic, in law a realist...

...The consequences of Holmes' doctrine, for anyone who is foolish enough, as Holmes was not, to follow it, are every bit as horrible as McKinnon and Adler say they are...

...See what man has done," they said fifty years ago, "all by himself...

...Man, including Holmes, lives by faith in God, and when he loses his faith in God he requires another "father figure," who is always, ultimately, Caesar...

...I am not a capitalist, so I will take time to take Prof...

...What humility...

...Their MILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, lectures throughout the country for the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Jewish Peace Foundation and the Great Books Foundation...

...What worried Holmes, as it should all men, was, Who is going to hold the rudder...

...We crusading liberals yap and yammer about our faith in democracy—and die for it whether or not it "gets itself accepted in the competition of the market...

...When you ask them whence, they get purple...

...My friends are all capitalists, and they have no time to heckle Prof...

...What they were trying to say— need I say that I have not read their remarks?—is that Holmes was so liberal in his philosophy (and religion) that there was a place in his liberalism, and a firm foundation in it, for every atrocity, including totalitarianism...

...What, if the law is not what the judges say it is, is man's last resort...

...When you ask them whither, they blow up...

...What they were denouncing was Holmes' denial of the existence of true authority for men's laws and their acts, a denial which, "given man's fallibility, paves the way for false authority, which always turns out to be totalitarianism...

...In the end, and this is what McKinnon and Adler were trying to say, Holmes' doctrine boils down to Goebbels' doctrine that "we think with our blood...

...We certainly must realize that we cannot eliminate Communism by war...

...I am Pegler's enemy, and so he has to be my lover, while I, since I am not a professing Christian, but only a fellow-traveler of Christianity, can get away with hating Pegler...

...And, McKinnon goes on (or should), where man's judgment fails (because man's reason works through his senses, which deceive him), God has provided Divine law, Holy Writ, so that "many may know," as St...

...A pox upon you...

...But, along with the freedom God gave him to act indecently, he has imprinted upon his heart the image of God, and so, however indecently he acts, and his state acts, and his church acts, however he crawls and kills and lusts, his heart yearns to be better, and to have the help that he can not give himself and no wretch like himself can give him...

...I say three friends of mine are charged — Harold McKinnon, the Lawyer That Thinks Like a Man, who attacked Holmes' philosophy as " fundamentally indistinguishable from the amoral realism of those regimes of force and power that are the scandal of the century...

...But," says Holmes, "reasonable men disagree about your self-evident truths, such as, 'All men are created equal.If men disagree about a self-evident truth," says Adler, "it follows from the self-evident truth of contradiction that, if some of them are right, some must be wrong...

...Holmes, more than any other great judge we have had, rejected the "market," even the "market" of his fellow-justices, as the test of truth...

...They are wise to do evil," said Jeremiah, "but to do good they have no knowledge...

...There is a natural law, discoverable by reason, upon which human law, to be binding, must rest...

...But I don't...

...Joe Pegler, and all the rest—were all foretold by Jeremiah, under whom I am licensed to operate...

...A CAPITALIST," said Jacques Maritain, "is a man who has no time...

...Adler could have written that—but not better—and McKinnon could have written Cicero's concluding remarks: "God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer...

...The democrat lives by faith, which he would abandon in an instant if its validity were determined by the Gallup poll...

...And the consequence, since he was a teacher, and an influential teacher, of his handsomely rounded loose talk was fatal to jurisprudence...

...Rodell apart and put him together again...

...In a word, a lovable fellow, because, of all the men we have all loved, we love Socrates the most for saying, "All that I know is that I know nothing...

...The voice of the mob, that is, is the only voice, and there is no God...

...In one day they are scribes and Pharisees, in another they are columnists and commentators...

...These principles are self-evident truths, known to be true as soon as their terms are understood...

...Prof...

...Thus, when it comes to what they live by, and die by, the truest Absolutists are the liberal crusaders like Socrates, Holmes, and Rodell...

...Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions and the wicked treat them with indifference...

...On the contrary, I am sure that a third World War would increase Communism, because the war would be so long drawn out and so disastrous that there would be a greater degree of dissatisfaction among the peoples of all nations than exists today...

...It needs no other expositor or interpreter than our own conscience...

...Rodell will not allow Holmes to say it (though Holmes has said it), because Holmes is the saint of the liberal crusade...

...If you can't prove your self-evident truths," says Holmes, "neither can you prove the conclusions that follow from them...

...It never seems to occur to these Prof...

...We argue that it is the best form of government, but even while we argue we deny that there is any such thing as good, better, or best...

...His articles have appeared in Commonweal, Harper's, Fellowship, Negro Digest, and Life...

...The reason he is my lover is that he is a professing Christian, and professing Christians are under the mortal injunction to love their enemy...

...This, of course, is fascism, communism, or any other horror you can think of, depending, as has been said, on what the judge ate for breakfast...

...In other words, the war would be caused by our intention to eradicate Communism...

...What McKinnon and Adler, then, should have said, is: "It is evident from the Absolute character of the decisions of the great dissenter that he did not mean what he said in praise of philosophical relativism and intellectual nihilism...

...They must come to pass, until Christ's return replaces their Hearst and McCormick contracts with a new contract written, as the Apostle Paul promises, in their hearts...

...If there is no recourse beyond the judges, then the judgments of Hitler's and Stalin's "People's Courts" are man's last resort, and John Dewey, who is to philosophy what Holmes was to law, should not have condemned the Moscow trials of the '30s as unjust...

...It's self-evident," says Adler...

...Rodell shudders to call "some sort of Absolute...

...For this crime, he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoids the usual misfortunes of the present life...

...These good men are true, who reject all faith for fear of a false one, love freedom and have poisoned its very well-springs by making man his own God...

...And Adler answers: "Man's reason, whose conclusions, which are law, may be tested by the first principles of reason...

...The reason is that all of these evils are, in their view, Absolutely real and real for Absolutely all men, here and everywhere, now and always...

...All of crusading liberalism is shot through with this Know-Nothingism, arising historically from the evils committed by the Absolute Church (and committed, before and since the Absolute Church, by the Absolute State...

...Professor Mortimer J. Adler, the Man That Thinks Like a Lawyer, who said that McKinnon's diagnosis of Holmes was "deadly accurate...

...Holmes, according to Rodell, (and Rodell, according to me) believes in "the essential dignity and decency of human beings...

...And Christian democracy will save him yet, but only after he has paid the price of the wisecracks of Holmes et al, which threw his philosophy and his law into the arms of Hitler and Stalin...

...There is nothing dignified or decent about the current behavior of human beings in Korea, in Moscow, in Washington, or in What Cheer, Iowa...

...But even while we yap and yammer and die, we deny the validity of faith...

...What scientific spirit...

...Our idea, and Holmes', seems to be that if everybody [eels all right— i.e., the way we do—everything will be jake...

...But McKinnon has a defense in depth...

...But they are lovers of liberty none the less, and their cockeyed denial of truth will not, I dare say, be held against them by its Author...

...Fred Ro-dell's "Holmes and His Hecklers" (April Progressive) drew fire from Milton Mayer, in the form of the article below, and we invited Fred Rodell to fire back—which he does in the article on Page 17...

...An ancient Roman poet—whose remarks I have read—said it better: "He who will not answer to the rudder will answer to the rock...

...He who obeys it not flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man...

...At this point, Holmes, and all the other skeptics, "rationalists," anti-rationalists, humanists, agnostics, and atheists, say nix...

...The Nonsense of Fred Rodell By MILTON MAYER It isn't often that Progressive regulars carry their intellectual and ideological feuds into the columns of their magazine, but this is a no-holds-barred exception...

...What tolerance...

...And we are trying to save his reputation from its own ruin, brought about by his doctrine, in which, as his decisions demonstrate, he did not believe...

...For men must have faith and they have it, and if they are persuaded that a good faith is no good, they Communism and the Next War "No matter what claims may be made that our attitude toward China is the result of Chinese aggression in Korea, I think the fact is very evident that if the present situation results in extension of the war, it will be due to our refusal to recognize the Chinese Government, because it is communistic...

...This law can not be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation...

...The trouble is, I think, that, since Holmes did not live by what he himself said, he did not mean what he said...

...It was either Holmes or one of his boys who said: "The law is what the judges say it is...

...And he does not live by faith in man, because man's conduct, as witness the present day, is unworthy of his faith...

...I say that McKinnon, Adler, and Pegler are friends of mine, but I must be more deadly accurate...

...If we know by faith, and not by inquiry, experimentation, and observation, then we have what Prof...

...What liberality...

...Rodell, who is no dummy, was unable to understand what McKinnon and Adler were talking about...

...Fred Rodell, whose article in the April issue of The Progressive, "Holmes and His Hecklers," discovers a blackguardish intent by three friends of mine to destroy the glorious name of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, selig...

...He belonged, on a higher level, to the anything-for-a-laugh school, or in the fascinated-by-the-sound-of-his-own-words department...

...Rodells—"these Bernards," as Dostoevsky would say with a sneer—that a living faith is a form of inquiry, experimentation, and observation...

...McKinnon and Adler are friends of mine, but Pegler is my lover...

...as a paid-up Christian, a communicant, indeed, of the R— C— Church, McKinnon says that reason is given man by God and so, therefore, is natural law, which reason discovers...

...The reason I don't is that these Peglers—Westbrook Pegler, Sokolsky Pegler, Fulton Pegler, Jr., Sen...

...They will not tolerate the inhumanity of fascism and communism and say, "Oh, well, who knows...

...Prof...

...The Peglers comes in, at this point, because Holmes was also a liberal crusader, who was Absolutely opposed to all of the social, political, and economic views on which the Peglers batten...

...Prove it," says Holmes...

...An ancient Roman prosist — a member of the original Roman church —said it better: "There is a true law," said Cicero, "a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil...

...Adler's answer is, in effect, "Reason...

...They will not tolerate the inhumanity of exploitation and discrimination and say, "Oh, well, who knows...

...Rodell wants to tell us that these words do not mean what they so unmistakably say, because, if they did...

...Thomas Aquinas puts it, "without any doubt what he ought to do...

...says Holmes, kind of leery, or skeptical...

...offense—Holmes' and Rodell's, that is, for they are licensed, as Socrates was not, to teach—is that they teach their anti-Absolutist theory or, more properly, their anti-Absolutist anti-theory to others...

...See what man has done, fifty years later, all by himself...

...Can any man know anything any more surely than that...

...Vox populi vox Dei can also be translated as "might makes right...

...But neither Socrates nor Holmes nor Rodell really believes that he knows nothing or lives by any such creed...

...Bv his own doctrine the "great dissenter" could not have dissented without being wrong...

...Holmes," says Rodell, who shares Holmes' skepticism, "would have nothing of Absolutes...

...Human law is tested, then, both by reason and by Scripture, or, in a word, by the eternal law of God, which both reason and Scripture particularize...

...As between McKinnon and Adler —let's forget Pegler—on the one hand and Rodell on the other, I must side against my friends and with Rodell, because my friends are guilty of the capital crime of failure to communicate...

...These are lovers of liberty, these Holmeses, who were victimized by the halucination of Progress...

...Those who cut him off from that help and tell him he doesn't need it throw him to Caesar, though they do not mean to...

...Great crusaders all, they are prepared to give their lives (and Socrates did) for their principles...

...These liberal crusaders are liberal crusaders because they are absolutists...

...they would mean that if Christ is rejected in the market, He is false...

...He can not stand alone,.and if God does not tell him how to use atomic energy Caesar will—and does...

...Prof...

...McKinnon seems to agree with Adler, because McKinnon holds with the natural law, discoverable by reason...

...Man's hands are full of blood, and he drools for more, though it means his own temporal and eternal destruction...

...and Westbrook Pegler, the columnist, who concluded, in his column, after reading McKinnon and Adler, that Holmes was "a senile and cynical brutalitarian" with "no more morals than a pig...

...McKinnon and Adler were guilty of crepitation and crepusculation, both in the first degree...

...II What all of these good men and true—who deny goodness and truth —will not face is the question, What, if we dispense with Holmes' nonsense, is the test of truth...