THE NONSENSE OF MILTON MAYER

...Where Mayer soaked up so virulent a case of authoritarianism I do not know, but I doubt that it can ever be purged out of him so long as he stays immersed in the works of those ancient sages whom he is forever quoting and who wrote most of The Great Books...

...Yes, Milton Mayer writes beautifully...

...and he, of all men, would defend the right of any dissident to express his thought over and over again until it maybe got accepted...

...he omits it, ignores it, pretends it cannot exist...

...As though the incalculable scope and complexity of men's thoughts and actions could be reduced to the elementary arithmetic of the two-table...

...By ignoring the grays, the in-betweens, the whole infinite diversity of life and of man's thought, the black-or-white boys find it a cinch to give their nonsense a mask of mathematical truth...

...Dictators only run men's lives...

...It is the experience of thinking—and so being free...

...Not that students should not read and know the classics of the past...

...For just as Milton Pegler's stuff is dangerous because it reaches so many gaping-and-swal-lowing-it-whole readers, just as Milton McKinnon's stuff and Milton Adler's stuff is dangerous because it gives to anti-intellectualism a front of intellectual respectability, so Milton Mayer's stuff, because he writes so beautifully, is not only arrant nonsense but dangerous nonsense...

...Moreover, those who may believe whole-hog in some things, such as the fight against intolerance, are branded by Mayer unqualified ab-s6lutists—which is precisely like saying that if you believe in racial equality you are a Communist because the Communists believe in it too...

...You see the trick...

...But when I read Mayer's stuff over again, I decided I had best cut out the kidding and answer him in dead earnest...

...If Mayer, using the same logic but with the source of his quotation corrected, now wants to deduce that Charles Evans Hughes had a fascist or communist philosophy, that is his own nonsensical privilege...

...I was going to kid him about his classic example of something that psychiatrists call projection, whereby he puts Justice Holmes in the "any-thing-for-a-laugh school or in the fascinated-by-the-sound-of-his-ownFRED RODELL, professor of law at Yale, examined "Holmes and His Hecklers" in the April issue of The Progressive, drawing fire from Milton Mayer, another frequent contributor to The Progressive, whose attack on Rodell's position appears in this issue...

...Thomas Aquinas, the less time left for the facts of life in the 20th Century— facts which the old boys never faced or knew...

...in the face of injustice...

...He calls it an expression of "fascism, communism, or any other horror you can think of" and uses it to clinch his case, in defense of McKinnon and Adler (and Pegler), that Holmes' philosophy was essentially totalitarian...

...and the syllogism ignores all the shades between...

...As for Mayer's own thinking, throughout the piece it runs in a sort of double rut...

...But my ten-year-old son, Mike, can already out-think him from a standing start...

...therefore they are absolutists...

...skeptics who believe in liberal causes are not indifferent to everything...

...If Mayer insists on displaying his own psychological short-pants in public, that is his business and I hope he is happy wearing them...

...And so Mayer pounds out his rigidly double-rutted nonsense on to the end: "if they [men] are persuaded that a good faith is no good, they will latch on to a bad one" and "if God does not tell him [man] how to use atomic energy Caesar will...

...Jefferson thought that was silly and so do I. In the third place, the more a man learns to revere the thoughts of thinkers of the past and to turn to those thoughts to solve his problems today, the less likely he is to learn to stand on his own mental feet and really think for himself...

...For most of the views expressed in them have since been accepted, just as Holmes hoped they would be, by the Supreme Court...

...No room for varying degrees of belief in varying kinds of causes...

...He writes so beautifully that his gay and pseudo-self-deprecatory professions of ignorance ("need I say that I have not read their remarks...

...Partial quotations and misquotations aside, nonsensical black-or-white thinking aside, the essence of Mayer's piece lies in its authoritarian defense of authoritarianism...

...with the passage of time, they have come to meet Holmes' "best test of truth...

...So it is with all the authoritarians, black-hearted or benevolent, from Milton Mayer up, down, forward, backward, and sideways...

...Thus, when Mayer says that denial of true authority leads to false authority, the logic clicks neatly but the conclusion is doubly fallacious...

...Mayer about taking me apart and putting me together again—all wrong...

...He says early that "man's reason works through his senses" and I found myself wondering whether Einstein used sight, hearing, taste, or touch to figure out his famous equations about time and matter...

...He writes so beautifully that his seeming air of friendliness and even flattery conceals—almost—his basic tone of cock-sure condescension...

...His entire message can be summed up in one sentence: Holmes and Rodell are wrong (or misguided) and McKinnon, Adler, and Pegler (who is somewhat misguided) are right because I, Milton Mayer, speaking for God, say this is so...

...I have been leery of the Great Books idea ever since, about fifteen years ago, I heard Robert Hutchins deliver a series of lectures which were turned into a not-so-great book called The Higher Learning which became the basis of the Great Books experiment at Chicago...

...If I were foolish enough to say Because Aristotle says so or God says so or President Truman says so, Mike would answer, "Aw, like fish, it's only you who are saying so...

...whole-hog or none...

...Mayer's piece is shot through with nonsense about how men think and what they think with...

...Somewhat later, Mayer "boils down" Holmes' "doctrine" to a belief that men think with their blood (a boiling-down just about as accurate as his "Holmesian" quotation) and this, says Mayer, is terrible because it was Goebbels' doctrine too...

...Now Mayer, as he so sweetly said of me, is no dummy either...

...In the first place, not all authority is completely true or completely false (where, for instance, would Mayer himself class the authority of the Pope...

...Now it happens that the man who said (if I may correct the quote), "The Constitution is what the judges say it is," was not Justice Holmes nor one of his boys either...

...to back that implication with an incomplete quote from Holmes is perhaps just a little dishonest itself...

...Whenever, tired or impatient, I try to use naked authority on Mike—Do this or Don't do that—he asks Why...

...When I first read Mayer's article on Holmes and me but mostly on Mayer, I planned to give it the light touch in reply...

...In the second place, those who habitually relate most of their thinking to stuff that was written centuries ago tend, as Thomas Jefferson once said (if I may quote an old boy myself), to "ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human...

...In trying to prove that Holmes "did not live by what he himself said," Mayer takes the famous "best test of truth" quotation and accuses Holmes of not following that test himself because, on the Supreme Court, he often dissented from the decisions of his fellow justices...

...But there are those of us who will have no more truck with benevolent authoritarians than we will with benevolent dictators...

...Here is the whole sentence, with one word italicized by me: "When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can safely be carried out...

...Fortunately, in view of his eloquence, Mayer is a "good" or benevolent authoritarian...

...Yet Mayer ends up with a pious preachment about man's heart yearning to be better—a phenomenon which he obviously applauds...

...Still again, when ridiculing Holmes' (and my) anti-authoritarian faith in the dignity and decency of human beings, Mayer says: "There is nothing dignified or decent about the current behavior of human beings in Korea, in Moscow, in Washington...

...But he balks at the further and related fact that men can mature beyond the need of a real or even a substitute father...

...Mayer with his either-or logic neither refutes nor disproves this view...

...it is the either-or, black-or-white, right-or-wrong, two-dimensional kind of thinking that stems from a misapprehension and misuse of the Aristotelian rules of logic and that absolutists from time immemorial have leaned on to purport to prove their points...

...It is always they who are saying This is right...

...He knew and he here stated that it takes time for a thought to "get itself accepted...

...It goes like this:—men must be either absolutists (complete believers) or else completely indifferent to everything...

...Mayer and his conveniently truncated quotation to the contrary, Holmes was not fool enough to suppose that a newly perceived truth would prevail in the market of ideas the very minute—or even the year or the decade—it was expressed...

...That is wrong, This is good, That is bad, no matter how desperately they may try to dignify as Ultimate Truth their personal predilections, prejudices, or prayers...

...I was going to kid him about his weird and wonderful mind-reading powers which allow him not only to tell McKinnon and Adler "what they were trying to say" but to divine that Justice Holmes, deceased, "did not mean what he said...

...Of course, the real root of Mayer's apostolic authoritarianism is the fact that he has never grown up enough in his mind to accept, as Holmes accepted, the cosmic uncertainty of life...

...The man who said it was Charles Evans Hughes, late Chief Justice of the U. S. Far from being one of Holmes' boys, Hughes was a conservative in the law, a conventionalist in life, and a hard-shelled practicing Baptist in religion...

...But to base an education-for-today on the thoughts of the old masters can have dangerous overtones...

...He writes so beautifully that the smooth, hypnotic flowing of his words conceals—almost—a lot of arrant nonsense...

...Rodell is the author of several books, including "Woe Unto You Lawyers" and "Fifty-Five Men—The Story of the Constitution," and of many magazine articles in Life, Harper's, The American Mercury, The Reader's Digest, and a number of law journals...

...As an anatomical matter I grant that the heart and the blood are not identical, but as the source of man's thinking or yearning I'm afraid I see little difference between them...

...It is futile to try to argue head-on with an authoritarianism so deeply and self-righteously imbedded as Milton Mayer's...

...words department"—two categories which could not conceivably by any stretch of the imagination be applied to Milton Mayer...

...he is, as he so constantly reminds us, on the side of God, not of Caesar or Hitler or Stalin or any other Devil...

...But there is at least one point where Mayer uses a type of argument somewhat more sinister than the silly logic of either-or...

...But he goes too far when he tries to herd the whole of the human race into his emotional kindergarten to keep him company...

...The most revealing sentence in Mayer's piece is the one where he categorically states that man "requires" a "father figure...

...He does not care that there are medical corpsmen in Korea performing life-saving acts of dignity and decency beyond any Mayer or Holmes or I ever performed, nor that there are dedicated and uncorrupted public servants still in Washington who serve their nation with dignity and decency, nor that there are doubtless Muscovites who lead dignified, decent personal lives under the shadow of the tyranny...

...To imply, as Mayer does, that it was a little dishonest of Holmes—in the light of his credo—to state his dissenting views once they had been outvoted is characteristic of Mayer's narrowly black-or-white mentality...

...apparently the last thing they would dream of using is the brain...

...That way lies authoritarianism—and as two prime examples I give you Mortimer Adler and Milton Mayer...

...Mayer has to say "nothing dignified or decent," because his mind is an all-or-nothing mind...

...III In the first place, the more time spent on Aristotle and St...

...As Exhibit A, take Mayer's statement that "Holmes or one of his boys . . . said: 'The law is what the judges say it is.' " Mayer does not use this quotation casually...

...I weep for him because he has never known the most exciting experience man can know...

...But for all his orthodoxies, Hughes was not fool enough to suppose that law was made by anything but man...

...I was going to kid the Rev...

...And he would be dead right...

...II Again, Mayer goes blithely and blindly black-or-white when he claims that all liberal crusaders are absolutists because they do not shrug and say, "Oh, well, who knows...

...As Milton Mayer doubtless does for infidel me, I weep for Milton Mayer...

...If I say Because this is right or that is wrong, he asks Why...

...He must know that, by omitting part of that quotation, he was able to twist out of it a meaning quite different from that which Holmes, by his words, clearly intended...

...authoritarians try to run men's minds...

...In the second place, there are those of us—and Holmes of course was one—who deny that there need be any authority, true or false or half-true-half-false, above and outside the minds of men...

...Apparently Mayer knows enough Freud to realize that the Absolutes some men cling to are indeed father-substitutes...

...It is the experience of using, unshielded by father figures, unfettered by Absolutes, the human mind...

...conceal—almost—his actual ignorance of much that he talks about...

...Indeed, the Holmes dissents are one of the best proofs of the precise opposite of what Mayer was trying to prove with them...