Posted on 10/31/2002 9:29:16 PM PST by Noumenon
A Philosophy - If You can Get One
The Germans of the Weimar period were increasingly frustrated, angry, disgusted with the “system,” and ready for change. So are Americans. The Germans, following their intellectuals, were disgusted with what they regarded as reason and freedom, and they were ready for Hitler. The Americans are disgusted with unreason and statism; but they are directionless. Without intellectual guidance, they do not know what went wrong with their system or how to prevent the country’s disintegration and collapse.
Thus, by default – despite the profound differences between Americans and the pre-Hitler Germans – the similarities between the two nations, the similarities between their intellectuals and the social trends they shape, are growing. The most ominous aspect of the trend is that, if it is not reversed, it will ultimately change the character of the American people. It has already begun to do so.
The philosophy that shapes a nation’s culture and institutions tends, other things being equal, to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: by creating the conditions and setting of men’s daily life, it increasingly establishes itself as an unquestioned frame of reference in most people’s minds. A society shaped by altruism, for instance – a society of chronic, politically enforced man-eat-man policies in the name of “the public welfare” – leads many of its victims to feel that safety lies in flaunting public service, that selfishness (the “selfishness” of others, who are draining them) is a threat, and that the solution is to urge and practice greater selflessness. A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal independence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant. A society shaped by irrationalism – a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist culture – leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e, that their own mind is inadequate, and that they need guidance from some higher power.
Thus, corrupt ideas, once institutionalized, tend to be continually reinforced (the same would hold true of rational ideas); and the unphilosophical men, however decent their own unidentified premises might be, eventually succumb. Across a span of generations they gradually relinquish any better heritage. In part, they are yielding to the explicit ideological promptings of their teachers and the universities. In part, they are adapting resignedly to what they have come to accept from their own experience as the facts and necessities of life.
The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand this kind of undermining indefinitely.
If the United States continues to go the way of all Europe, the people’s rebellion against the present intellectual leadership will be perverted, and re-channeled into an opposite course.
Nonintellectual rebels cannot challenge the fundamental ideas they have been taught. All they can do by way of rebellion is to accept a series of false alternatives urged by their teachers, and then defiantly choose what they regard as the anti-establishment side. Thus, the proliferation of groups that uphold anti-intellectuality as the only alternative to today’s intellectuals; mindless activism as the alternative to “moderation”; Christian faith as the alternative to nihilism; female inferiority as the alternative to feminism; racism as the alternative to egalitarianism; sacrifice in behalf of a united nation, as the alternative to sacrifice on behalf of warring pressure groups; and government controls for the sake of the middle class, as the alternative to government controls for the sake of the rich or the poor.
The type of mentality produced by these choices – activist, religionist, racist, nationalist, authoritarian – would have been familiar in the Weimar Republic.
If it happens here, the primary responsibility will not belong to the people, who still reject such a mentality and are groping for a better kind of answer. The responsibility will belong to those who banished from the schools all knowledge of the original American system, and who would have finally convinced the nation that men’s only choice is a choice of dictatorships.
No one can predict the form or the timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our direction is not changed. No one can know the concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, would finally break the nation’s spirit and system of government. No one can know whether such a breakdown would lead to an American dictatorship directly – or indirectly, after a civil war and/or a protracted Dark Ages of primitive roving gangs.
What one can know is only this much: the end result of the country’s present course is some kind of dictatorship; and the cultural-political signs for may years now have been pointing increasingly to one kind in particular. The signs have been pointing to an American form of Nazism.
If the political trend remains unchanged, the same fate – collapse and ultimate dictatorship – is in store for the countries of Western Europe, which are farther along the statist road than America is, and which are now obviously In the process of decline and disintegration. (The Communist countries and the so-called “third world” have long since fallen, or have never risen to anything.) A European dictatorship need not be identical to an American one; dictatorships can vary widely in form, according to a given people’s special history, traditions, and crises; in form, but not in essence.
Most of the East is gone. The West is going
A German intellectual made the following statement after the Nazis fell from power.
”In the early days of Hitler’s regime, he recalled, anyone troubled by the Nazi practices and concerned about Germany’s future was shrugged off as an alarmist. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.”
One can “know, or surmise the end” by knowing what cause produces what effect, i.e., what factor determines the fate of nations.
Today, the only nation still capable of saving itself, and thereby the world, is the United States. It can do so only by one means.
The Constitution cannot stop the trend. A constitution, however noble, cannot stand the death or eclipse of its animating principle.
Religion cannot stop the trend. It helped to cause it.
The demonstrated practicality of the original American system cannot stop the trend. Practicality as such does not move nations.
The profound differences between America and Germany – the differences in history, institutions, heroes, national character, starting premises - cannot stop the trend. After a century, a crucial similarity began to develop between the two countries, the similarity of basic ideas; and this one similarity is gradually overriding, subverting, or negating the differences, and consigning their remnants to the dead end the unappreciated, the undefended, the historically impotent.
There is only one antidote to today’s trend: a new, pro-reason philosophy. Such a philosophy would have to offer for the first time a full statement and an unbreached defense of the fundamental ideas of America.
The same German intellectual quoted above, looking back at Hitler's rise to power said,
"Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"
They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, U of Chicago Press, pp 167-68.
The Ominous Parallels
1980 Leonard Peikoff
I think that leftist Judicial Activism has probably been as destructive to Constitutional principles as our leftist legislatures and Presidents have been. The turning points for the Judicial Branch are few and far between. We could have the best series of roll backs in leftist legislation all go for naught, if leftist Judicial Activism mandates all sorts of programs, correctives and similar claptrap like they have done the last five decades since Eisenhower put Warren on the Court.
Both factions on the USSC have been consistently supporting big government socialistic programs since FDR. Imagining that some new republican appointments will 'roll back' anything is a futile dream.
I thought I was hearing a call for forthright espousal of a return to Constitutional principle and value, and not just a lament and love-song to the barricades. What can be more in the way of a long-term turn around of that branch than nominations being confirmed now rather than taking our luck in 2004?
I suggest you read Noumenons 'lament' again. He calls for a new constitutional dialog, one where we 'conservatives' can all develop common ground on principles.
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-- In effect, you're saying that we shouldn't talk about our crazy old senators, till after the election.
Hardly. Read it again. The "this" I refer to is the passage I quote. I'm saying that for too many months the immediacy of transitory electoral issues have sanitized the forum from paying attention to real conservative principles. Why else have you and I occasionally been on the same side? My real reservation from Noumenon's post is its reliance on libertarian rhetorical terms...too much Philosophy and Reason...kind of the thing that always makes it difficult for you to find common ground with me even if we start to agree.
Sorry, your rhetoric lost me again. I can't find 'common ground' on such vague generalities.
..fear that the terms (Justice, Duty, Enduring Moral Order, Presriptive Convention -- you know all those plain conservative terms) will somehow make me ask for more than simple, Constitutional, principles. I'll certainly settle for the compromise that our two flavors of the American Spirit had in 1789 and I know that you will settle for nothing less.
Ah, mmm, sure, - I guess.
Where is Noumenon?!
It's not inconceivable that we might reach a similar collectivist point some day. But so much of what's happened since Peikoff wrote his book has reflected a tendency in the opposite direction, away from statism, collectivism or conformism. Such a trend won't continue forever, and perhaps a new collectivist age will come in the future. Peikoff's Carter-era warnings are worth hearing again, but they don't seem to reflect the current situation just now.
Randian warnings against the state are bound to be right some time. At some point the government will probably try to take more power than it deserves. But the Randians may be in the position of the boy who cried "Wolf!" warning in season and out, warning as much against innoculous or necessary measures as against truly tyrannical ones. When a warning is necessary, it may well be ignored.
I think that you've got the correct take on Peikoff's anti-religious outlook as evideneced in his statement that religion helped to cause the fall of the old Weimar Republic. The failure of virtually every great religion to hew to the teachings of its founders is only part of the story - the trouble with the majority of belief systems is that such ideas or sytems of thought and belief are readily co-opted or hijacked by those who use them to their own political ends. You don't have to look too far to find evidence of this. It's an age-old struggle - in the search for meaning, purpose and something larger than ourselves, we - as humankind - have been all too willing to hand our bodies, minds and spirits over to those who use them for sake of excersisng power; it's always been the path of least resistance. And it's the road to spiritual slavery.
But it's the extent to which all of our 'mainstream' religious belief systems have become hollowed out and held utterly in thrall to the heirs and disciples of Gramsci. For all their impact and influence on the course of human lives and souls; for al their dedication to the destruction of human freedom, dignity and spiritual soverignty, they are no better than the Aztec ghouls who capered about their bloody altars dressing the freshly flayed skins of their victims. R. J. Rummel characterized the professors, scholars and political 'scientists' who preach the same self loathing and hatred of freedom as 'the clergy of oppression.' The clerics who preach passivity, submission, and sheepery from their pulpits are no less the same clergy of oppression, because - intentionally or not - they are its aiders and abettors.
I agree that we as parents are the keepers of he keys, and part of our duty lies in raising our kids to be philosophers, warriors and spiritually sovereign individuals. This, of course, is in diametric oppostion to the entire zeitgeist, and in that sense, we're at war, because war it is. Everything else is virtually a sideshow. Weapons of mass distraction.
That's for sure - it's a cultural war that's on the verge of running white hot. Homeschool your kids? You're a subversive. Believe int he Constitution? You're an extremist. Own a gun? You're a criminal. Think that there's such a thing a right and wrong? You're a bigot or worse.
At least, that's what you hear coming from our universities, our popular culture, and a disquieting number of our so-called leaders.
And when the killer without conscience on the Left decide that after this recent election they've been backed into a corenr and there's nothing left to lose, then what? We know the answer to that, don't we?
But cornelis has something in his statement. The crux of it is this: no matter what the intent of our erstwhile minders, they are no less immune to the tides of history and the law of unintended consequences. The fact that we're still able to have such a discussion is cause for hope. The fact that many of us - as no other folks in history - have the training, the means and the moral certainty to act in the cause of liberty may well be our salvation.
One point I will make is that the article, written in 1980, could not predict the influence of Ronald Reagan or the Republican revolution of the mid-90s. Conservatism today has a much stronger voice than it did during the miserable 70s, especially in light of recent events. There is a case for guarded optimism.
A second point which you touched on briefly; I am a proponent of the TWO party system. As Machiavelli clearly elucidated, the Roman Republic required power for both patricians and plebes (the Senate and the Tribunes) to establish stability. America is strong because we have only two parties, each acting as a corrective on the excesses of the other.
This doesn't mean that I feel our gov/culture has achieved perfection (it never will), however, comparisons to Nazi Germany are of little value.
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