One of my pet peeves is the trope, “In these troubled times….” A few weeks ago, I was at a conference also attended by a much younger and quite pessimistic professor of English. I tried to buck him up by telling him that things were not going to hell in a hand basket. Indeed, politically speaking, things were looking up. Mine was a comment, not on current party politics, but on the revival of classical liberalism, the more radical variant of which is libertarianism. He tried to take solace from my going back from decade to decade in search of one where times were less troubled than today.
The 70’s? (Vietnam, boat people, gas lines, stagflation, Iranian hostage crisis, the cold war)
The 60’s? (Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations, race riots, Vietnam, but an excellent sound track, the cold war)
The 50’s? (Korea, global Communism, Mutual Assured Destruction, Selma, the cold war)
The 40’s? (WWII, the Holocaust)
The 30’s? (the Great Depression, the rise of National Socialism and Fascism, War in Europe)
The 20’s? (Prohibition and the attendant rise of organized crime with its widespread violence and corruption, stock market collapse)
The 10’s? (WWI and the “lost generation”)
Too much before then and I lose my sense of the decades, but we had the savagery of Southern reaction to Reconstruction followed by a racial apartheid that lasted until the 1960s, and legal slavery before that–not to mention a Civil War in between that killed more Americans than any other and the Indian Wars that followed. The antebellum decades were not all that terrific either.
To all this you can add the lack of antibiotics.
In other words, all times are troubled but, since the 1980s, things have been comparatively blissful–and I include in this assessment the post-911 world for all its tragedy, tumult and a global war between the United States and its allies and the NGOs of Islamo-fascism and their government enablers.
But I could tell he was unconvinced. So perhaps he would be more interested in this essay by William F. Buckley from the inaugural issue of the National Review in 1955. Does this sound familiar?
“I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,” said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.” We have come around to Mr. Holmes’ view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.
Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler’s bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper’s will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is a serious question of whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is a dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality of never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.
In my proto-libertarian youth, I had two sources of political inspiration (other than my father): Milton Friedman’s column in Newsweek magazine, and the National Review. The undeniable ugliness of today’s political and intellectual climate stems not from the fact that times are worse, but from the fact that a great ideological debate has been joined. A debate, I should add for those prone to undue optimism, that will never end. There will always be forces arrayed for and against liberty, for and against the state. All that changes is who has the upper hand. At the moment, we are in something close to equipoise politically, but I believe (and I know others will passionately disagree) that classical liberal ideas have been on the ascendency for a long time and are now the engine driving the intellectual debate, just as communism and socialism was when Buckley wrote 50 years ago.
What has not changed nearly enough is the marginality of classical liberal ideas among tenured academics, but even here there is simply no comparison between academia today and that of only a few years ago. Someone recently asked me how I am treated by my fellow law professors–whether modern liberal or more leftist–expecting me to complain of abuse and insult. I could truthfully say that, for whatever reason, I am quite consistently treated with much courtesy and respect by my colleagues both at home and away. Those who despise my ideas keep whatever malevolent thoughts they may have to themselves. Add to this the enthusiasm and idealism of the many students I met at the 45 laws schools on my tour and at the many others I visited in recent years.
This is not to say that no ideological discrimination against classical liberals exists in academia. I have witnessed it first hand and think it is quite common. But I have also witnessed discrimination against the radical left by more mainstream modern liberals. This is more a function of the corrupting affect of being in the majority, I think, than of which ideology is dominant. As soon as there are some classical liberals in a department, the personal cost of discriminating against others increases, as it does when there are blacks or other minorities in the room.
Of course, much remains to be done on the field of ideas, but I think we who love liberty should pause to appreciate the progress that has been made and that continues apace.
CORRECTION: An astute reader points out that the violence in Selma occurred in the 1960s not the 50s. I was thinking of the Little Rock crisis when President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce a desegregation order (this is from the Eisenhower Presidential Archives):
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education that segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” In September 1957, as a result of that ruling, nine African-American students enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The ensuing struggle between segregationists and integrationists, the State of Arkansas and the federal government, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus has become known in modern American history as the “Little Rock Crisis.” The crisis gained attention world-wide. When Governor Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School to keep the nine students from entering the school, President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to insure the safety of the “Little Rock Nine” and that the rulings of the Supreme Court were upheld. The manuscript holdings of the Eisenhower Library contain a large amount of documentation on this historic test of the Brown vs. Topeka ruling and school integration. [available at the above link–RB]
Update: A reader provides this link to a story about a skeleton of a teen from the 1660s found buried from in basement:
He suffered from tuberculosis and worked so hard that he had herniated discs and other back injuries. An infection in his rotting teeth might have caused his death. He had 19 cavities.
Some may discount this sort of story as being about “mere” physical standards of living, rather than matters more spiritual or cultural. For them, another reader brings to my attention this marvelous poem by Billy Collins, my favorite line of which is “Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.”:
Nostalgia
Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of
stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.
The 1790’s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
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