I know a certain news syndicate manager who is looking for a good young liberal columnist to balance the conservatives whom he already merchandizes. He won’t find one. For the truth is that liberalism, in its modern centralizing, collectivizing, and statist connotations, is no longer producing ideas that carry conviction. The young who go for modern liberalism — the students who join such organizations as Students for a Democratic Society — have abandoned thought in favor of action. They are against the “Establishment”—but the Establishment is itself the product of modern liberalism. They are against “hypocrisy,” but everybody, to them, is a hypocrite if he compromises enough with society to make a living. The expression of modern liberalism, with the more vocal rising generation, is the “confrontation,” the demonstration, the riot. It does not lend itself to reason and to words.
The anarchistic urge does not produce a lasting movement, unless, as could conceivably happen in the wake of a great national defeat, a collectivistic dictatorship takes over amid the chaos that recklessness can produce. M. Stanton Evans, the Indianapolis editor who specializes in political demography, obviously doesn’t think the U.S. is about to be defeated. His The Future of Conservatism: From Taft to Reagan and Beyond (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $5.95) combines eloquence and statistics to prove that the conservative trend is building up such a head of steam that it can’t be stopped, even though modern liberals may continue to win some election victories.
Mr. Evans can count noses and analyze the election returns with the best of them. But he cuts much deeper than your ordinary political demographer. He finds certain telltale signs in the “common findings of the new conservatives and the new consensus liberals.” For some years now the allied conservative and libertarian causes have been producing a new intellectual journalism. Where there was once only a FREEMAN, there is now a whole group of magazines — National Review, Modern Age, Rally, Triumph, The Intercollegiate Review. The intellectual bankruptcy of the old liberal journalism of ideas is apparent when you compare any issue of the Nation or the New Republic with the editorial sections of the mass media. They are utterly indistinguishable in their repetitions of the current “conventional wisdom.”
A Sinking Ship
But the current conventional wisdom has begun to bore such liberal intellectuals as Richard Goodwin, a former aide to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and Daniel P. Moynihan, author of a controversial study of the breakdown of the Negro family in the so-called ghetto. Goodwin professes to being troubled with “the growth in central power” that has been “accompanied by a swift and continual diminution in the significance of the individual citizen, transforming him from a wielder to an object of power.” Noting the “fantastic labyrinth of welfare programs” and the “monstrous incapacities of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare,” Goodwin says there is “something wrong with the old approach.” “The idea of decentralization,” he concludes, “is making its first timid and tentative appearances in political rhetoric. It is possible to predict that the first party to carry this banner (if buttressed by a solid program) will find itself on the right side of the decisive issues of the 1970′s.”
Broken Promises
Moynihan’s retreat from the current conventional wisdom of the collectivistic and centralizing liberals is even more pronounced than Goodwin’s: “Liberals,” he says in a sudden spate of revelation, “have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to have been endowed with at birth, namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.” Moynihan’s own conclusion is that the riots in seventy-five U.S. cities have resulted because the centralizing liberals “raised hopes out of all proportion to our capacity to deliver on our promises.” Speaking for his own liberal movement, Moynihan says his colleagues “must divest themselves of the notion that the nation, especially the cities, can be run from agencies in Washington.”
A Healthy Skepticism
It takes special will power for the old-style libertarian to resist throwing a sarcastic “I told you so” in the faces of Goodwin, Moynihan and Company. But the will to resist should be invoked, for who among us is without sin? At least nine out of ten of us fell for some of the nostrums of the nineteen thirties. Those of us who discovered the need for “a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good” in the late years of the New Deal should extend a charitable welcome to an Irving Kristol when he suddenly despairs of bureaucratic solutions to our troubles. And when a Richard Goodwin says it is “just possible that conservatives have something to teach about the value of institutional arrangements, and the unwisdom of sacrificing them to immediate desires,” we should say, “Welcome aboard.”
The mass media publications have been slow to catch on to the growing philosophical doubts among the liberals. As Mr. Evans says, there are two Americas. First, there is the “America we read about in the glossy magazines, glimpse in some portions of the daily press, hear discussed on the national TV programs.” In this America every problem can be solved by an increase in governmental services from the Federal authorities… and (by) a program of cautious accommodation of the Soviet Union.” The second, and “other,” America is only discovered by putting aside that mass magazine and turning off the TV set. But, curiously, a majority of the U.S. people live in the “other America.”
Shifting Political Patterns
Mr. Evans proves this conclusively by analyzing the political changes of the nineteen sixties against the backdrop of westerly and southerly shifts in the population statistics, and against the drift of people into the suburbs. The northeast quadrant of the United States, where liberalism still calls the tune in local politics, has been growing at a pace considerably slower than the rest of the nation. The East, in the decade of the fifties, grew in population by 13.2 per cent; the Midwest, by 16.1 per cent; the South, by 16.5 per cent (and this despite the Negro exodus to Detroit, Chicago, and New York); and the West, by the huge figure of 38.9 per cent. California, Texas, and Florida have all become giant states, quite capable of canceling the liberalism of New York and Pennsylvania in political years. California has its Governor Ronald Reagan, Florida its Governor Claude Kirk, Texas its Senator John Tower. The Republicans elected ten new governors in 1966, seven of them in the South and West. And, says Mr. Evans, seven out of a total of eleven governors in the West are considered to be conservatives.
The figures being what they are, it is small wonder that the so-called Eastern Establishment is having a hard time dominating Republican politics. Moreover, the growth of the suburbs, which nurture a conservative philosophy, is changing things even in the Northeast. Today more than fifty-eight million Americans live in the suburbs, a gain of almost 50 per cent in a decade. By contrast, the central cities gained only 11 per cent.
Mr. Evans thinks the Reagan victory in California is a portent of things to come on the national scene (though not necessarily in terms of a personal Reagan shift from Sacramento to the White House). Reagan put together a coalition of taxpayers, homeowners, and suburbanites by “surfacing all the anxieties which it should be the business of the Republican Party… to elicit.” When the same coalition decides on a national candidate, says Mr. Evans, it will elect a President.
THE SYMPHONY OF LIFE by Donald Hatch Andrews (Lee’s Summit, Mo.: Unity Books, 1966), 423 pp., $4.95.
THE BROKEN IMAGE by Floyd W. Matson (New York: George Braziller, 1964), 355 pp., $6.95.
Reviewed by Edmund A. Opitz
Professor Andrews’ book is the fruit of a lifetime spent in the fields of chemistry and mathematical physics. He is also a knowledgeable musician and, as the present volume demonstrates, is gifted with poetic imagination of a high order. Andrews ponders such startling breakthroughs in twentieth century science as radioactivity, X rays, the photoelectric effect, the quantum theory and the theory of relativity; then he develops a breakthrough of his own — offering music as the new model of the universe.
The older scientific model inherited from Sir Isaac Newton was the machine; whatever scientific investigators and theorists could not interpret along mechanical lines was swept under the rug, into the category of unreality. Reality was regarded as an intricate piece of clockwork; the idea of mechanism reigned supreme. It was futile to point out, as some continued to do, that the idea of mechanism is not a conclusion reached by mechanical means, but by free thought; and that the mind, therefore, must be outside the machine, and indeed its creator.
The logic of these critics is as impeccable as it was unacceptable. Treat things as if they are mechanical, it was said in reply, and you get results; and these results are superior to anything produced by two thousand years of logic chopping! The material accomplishments of recent centuries reflect mental capacity of a high order, but while these marvels were honored mind itself was downgraded, reduced to an emanation of bits of matter.
We have now come full circle, to the point where the very progress of scientific investigation itself produces results which are inexplicable in terms of mechanics. It is music, argues Dr. Andrews, which provides us with the choicest clue as to the nature of the universe, and “in shifting the basis of our ideas about the universe from mechanics to music,” he writes, “we move into an entirely new philosophy of science.”
This is not so much to move off in a new direction as to step into a new dimension, and a little background reading might be helpful. Older works on the philosophy of science, such as those by Whitehead, Eddington, and Joad, are still useful, but the recent book by Mr. Matson is even more pertinent. Matson is a philosopher, if by that label we understand a man who has so steeped himself in several disciplines that he gains a commanding vision which enables him to knit their separate findings into a coherent whole. This book surveys the centuries since Newton in terms of the ideas which have had a decisive impact on man’s thinking about himself. Does the image man frames of himself enhance his humanity or downgrade it? The latter, Mr. Matson demonstrates. Men have tried to live with a distorted image of themselves, an image accorded the prestige of science until recently. But the forces of reconstruction are now gathering strength, and they are to be found among contemporary physicists, biologists, and psychologists; “all the way from the physics laboratory to the therapeutic clinic,” he writes.
“Science” is a god-term, and many are offended if it is spoken of less than reverentially; such persons equate science with truth. Most genuine scientists, however, are able to view the matter objectively. Science is indeed one of the proudest accomplishments of the human spirit, generously enlisting the services of all sorts and conditions of men. It depends on the rare innovator and trail blazer at the top end of the spectrum; makes use of the plodding, patient experimenter at the other; while in between it employs a variety of talents. The beneficent results of science on its own level speak for themselves.
But there is a dark side, for science is also a mystique, the prevailing faith of our time; it breeds an ideology, scientism, whose coarse growth tends to choke out all in life that is not quantitative and measurable — including the perceiving mind itself! Furthermore, this ideology has provided a plausible rationale for setting up planned states where the masses of men are manipulated by their “betters,” and the economy is forced into the pattern they have selected. These untoward by-products of science have come under sporadic criticism for several centuries, but the jabs were brushed aside as coming from philosophers, religionists, and men of letters.
The good news now is that scientists themselves, in growing numbers, are beginning to overhaul their own disciplines to take out the overweening pretensions. A handful of men let this genie out of the bottle, and along with an enormous amount of good, his clumsiness in the sectors beyond his competence have done immeasurable damage. Kept within bounds he may fulfill his early promise, but in order for this to occur a new perspective and mood must be engendered, wherein man is regarded “as an indivisible subject rather than an assembled product.” The idea is that until man makes something of himself, he won’t be able to make real sense of the universe around him. Well, what kind of a species is the one to which we belong?
Man is the unfinished animal par excellence. In the case of most, if not all, other organisms, the initial endowment is potent enough to propel the organism from birth to mature form by a sort of unfoldment from within. Maturation occurs more or less automatically. Man’s situation is radically different. The infant’s endowment may be ever so generous but this is not sufficient to guarantee a superior adult. He is shaped in the family environment and by his culture, but the critical touches are added by himself; the full stature of personhood cannot be attained unless the individual takes himself in hand and makes something of himself.
This he will not do if he believes he cannot do it. If the prevailing ideology assumes that the individual is a mere creature of his environment, then that’s what individuals will tend to become.
If it is believed that men can take hold of themselves in creative ways, then they will do so and overcome environmental difficulties. What a man believes about himself significantly affects what he may become, and his chances of coming upon the right ideas are diminished if the ideological trend in his society is moving strongly in the wrong direction.
The animal is content just to live; not so man. The animal seeks to eat and avoid being eaten; he breeds, dies, and his race continues. Man, on the other hand, is a self-conscious being, aware of himself and of a not-self. The not-self out there is nature, both animate and inanimate. Nature has many facets; friendly, hostile, indifferent. Originally, at the mercy of nature and tethered by a chronically short food supply, man gradually learned to turn nature to his own uses: by taming fire, inventing the lever, and so on. Enhancing his mastery over nature, he outgrew nomadism and became a herdsman, then an agriculturalist, and finally a city dweller. Civilization is spawned by city life, and at the dawn of history man is lord of the planet; philosopher, builder, worshipper, poet, artist, hero.
The monuments of the past testify that the human race has had moments of splendor, but for millions of human beings over the centuries life must have been brutish and short. They were a tough breed, however, in whom a kind of animal hope rarely faltered. Then, about four centuries ago men began to exploit a technique which gave them an immense amount of knowledge of nature and enormous control over nature’s processes. Science in the modern sense, “the glorious entertainment,” as Jacques Barzun calls it, was launched by the work of such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and especially Newton.
The results speak for themselves, on the plus as well as on the minus side. Science has given men inordinate power over nature and they use some of this power to threaten and destroy each other. Science has saved life and extended the life span to the point where expanding populations crowd each other to the edges of the planet. We have better means of communication and worse things to say; faster means of getting there and less important things to do once we arrive. Man the maker and doer is proud of his stupendous inventions and magnificent artifacts, but he spends some vital essence in producing them and feels dwarfed and robotized in consequence; man the philosopher and belle-lettrist wallows in despair. The prevalent philosophy, existentialism, poises man one step short of suicide; and in modern fiction he is often portrayed as a pitiful slob.
Is it surprising, though, that a technique which rigorously excluded every human element from its methodology in the beginning should, in the end, find man less than human? Science did not deal with the whole man, and those elements of human nature excluded by its investigative techniques return to bedevil us. This is the chapter about to close; for while the previous course of science was running down to its bitter end, new trails were being broken by science itself which point in an entirely different direction. We need, therefore, a new guide, one who will offer us not just a blueprint but a vision. Blueprint and vision are each necessary; the former to be learned, the latter caught. Dr. Andrews’ remarkable book is highly contagious.
