Vol. 10.10, October 1977

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME X NUMBER 10	OCTOBER, 1977	US-ISSN0047-4517

The New York Mayoralty

I: THE KOCH VICTORY

There are several important points to be made about the victory of Representative Ed Koch as the new Mayor of New York (“Fun”) City. First is the joy in our hearts at the results—the almost incredible results—of the first Democratic primary on September 8. It was that primary that decisively knocked out of the race the two truly insufferable, intolerable candidates for Mayor: the aged, incompetent if not crooked incumbent Abe Beame; and the raging monster Bella Abzug. Since these were precisely the two candidates favored to win and enter the succeeding runoff, the defeat of Beame and Abzug was like a reprieve, a breath of fresh air in an increasingly decaying city.

Part of the victory was ideological. From someone who was barely known in his own Congressional district and not at all outside of it, Koch was thrust into the voters’ consciousness by a TV blitz masterminded by Dave Garth, the Little Napoleon of political campaigns. From an ordinary and colorless liberal Democrat, Koch, impelled by Garth, suddenly moved rightward to capture the burning and increasing interest of the New York masses in the two Big Issues in New York City: crime, and the permanent fiscal crisis and decay in services resulting from it. Crime boiled down to the usual rampant mugging, aggravated this summer by Son of Sam and by the massive looting during one of New York’s traditional lengthy blackouts. The fact that the police were instructed to look the other way while “the ‘hungry’ community” rolled up in cars to heist cameras, TV sets, et al. left a searing mark on the public consciousness. Beame was implicated both in this decision and in the fiscal crisis, a legacy of many years of Beame as Controller of the city’s finances.

Cleverly, Koch came down hard with a libertarian-leaning position on the two big issues. On crime, Koch called for the restoration of capital punishment for murder, and stated that the National Guard should have been mobilized to shoot the looters. In this, Koch gladdened the hearts of countless New Yorkers, who have been cowed and beaten in by criminals for much too long. When asked how these positions squared with his liberalism, Koch got off the best line of the campaign: “I’ve never equated liberalism with insanity.” On the fiscal crisis, also, Koch had the courage to come down hard on one of the major continuing culprits: the municipal employees unions whose demands are partly responsible for the swollen government spending. Here again, the public, disgusted with unionism and especially with high-pay, no-service government employee unions, responded with enthusiasm.

Abe Beame sobbed and sighed at the outcome—but in the immortal phrase that Liberace has donated to our culture, he went crying all the way to the bank. It turns out that Abe will start collecting his lifelong pension, which will be higher than his current salary. Which demonstrates that it is now impossible for the voters to get any politician off their backs—hell, they just shift to the lucrative pension rolls. The abolition of pensions for politicians should be a high-priority item, not just for libertarians, but for any people of good sense who don’t relish being ripped off forever.

Unfortunately, the smashing of Bella, even coming after her loss in the Democratic primary for Senate last year, has not ended the Abzug threat for very long. Bella now threatens to run for Koch’s seat in Congress next year; the fact that she doesn’t live in the district is not the sort of thing to feaze her. Since the district is a stronghold of wealthy WASPS (in the old days it used to be called the “silk-stocking district”) Bella, whose style is geared toward left-wing Jews, cannot be considered a shoo-in.

This brings us to the ethnic factor, which was the most decisive single element in the mayoral race. Until the 1950’s, there was a peculiar disjunction in political reportage in this country, a disjunction between what everyone in his right mind knew about voting patterns, and what everyone was allowed to write (despite the First Amendment.) Namely, everyone knew that crucial to politics was ethnic voting: a “Jewish vote”, an “Italian vote”, a “Negro vote”, etc. As a result, at least in the days before open primaries, state and local tickets were carefully balanced among the leading ethnic groups. But it was considered an unbreachable no-no for anyone to even mention these ethnic voting patterns, because anyone who did so was considered—horrors—a “racist”. And so political writers had to preserve the fiction of each individual voter carefully sitting down to research and sift all the critical issues before casting his vote. Or even if the voter was considered frivolous and influenced by the personality of the candidate, the ethnic nature of such candidate and such voter could never be specified.

This taboo was courageously broken in the 1950’s by the astute political commentator Samuel Lubell, who started writing quite candidly about the ethnic vote. Lubell’s being Jewish might have helped him break the barrier; if he had been a WASP, it is doubtful that he would have gotten away with it.

At any rate, ethnic lives! because the ethnic factor loomed remarkably large in this mayoral campaign. If one analyzes the voting districts carried by the numerous candidates in the Democratic primary, there is a one-to-one correlation between the ethnic composition of the candidate and of his winning districts. Thus: Mario Cuomo (Italian) carried all the Italian districts (and Irish districts, to the extent that there are any left in New York City—that is, Cuomo carried the white-Catholic districts); Herman Badillo (Puerto Rico), carried all the Puerto Rican districts; Percy Sutton (black) carried all the black areas; the other candidates in the race (all Jews) divided the Jewish districts, as follows: Beame (an elderly Brooklyn Jew) carried all the elderly Brooklyn Jewish districts’ and their moral equivalents in the other boroughs; Koch (a middle-class Jewish professional) carried all the middle-class Jewish professional districts, notably Forest Hills in Queens, and Riverdale in the Bronx; and Abzug, (a far-left Jewess from the West Side of Manhattan—a Jewish-dominated area that is one of the most left-wing districts in the nation) carried the West Side of Manhattan. It all hung together.

If one asks how come there are so many Jewish voting districts in New York, far out of proportion to the Jewish percentage of the population, the answer—well-known to all political observers in the city—is simply this: Jews vote in remarkably high proportions, in Democratic primaries as well as elections. On the other hand, Negroes and Puerto Ricans have a very low voting turnout, particularly in primaries, whose significance they have not yet seemed to grasp.

The triumph of ethnic over ideology was starkly revealed in the second, runoff primary between Koch and Cuomo, which turned out to be a straight down the line, Jewish vs. white-Christian contest. Every Jewish district went for Koch, including not only Beame’s but even Abzug’s; they voted solidly for Koch, even though they were presumably leftists and were shifting to the man generally perceived as the most right-wing of the Democratic contestants. Ethnic lived. As for the black and Puerto Rican districts, they too went pretty much (though not as solidly) for Koch, largely because of deals made by black and Puerto Rican leaders during the intense political maneuvering that went on in the eleven days between the two primaries. So blatant was the ethnic nature of the battle that Cuomo —the hand-picked candidate of the Establishment—repeatedly deplored the Jewish vs. Christian character of the contest.

Another quasi-subterranean element in the mayoral campaign was sex. Rumors were widespread that lifelong bachelor Koch is a homosexual, to the extent that one Cuomo slogan in the conservative areas of Queens county was: “vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” It was largely to counteract these rumors that Koch had well-known consumerite Bess Meyerson constantly at his side during the campaign, and why he certainly never discouraged rumors that he and Bess would soon be married (we’ll see what happens after the election.) Miss Meyerson, it should be added, has a special place in the hearts of New York Jewry as being the only Jewish Miss America in the history of that contest.

That Koch’s quasi-libertarian stance might not survive his election is indicated by the political jockeying before and since the runoff. It had been originally planned that former Tammany leader Edward Costikyan—who ran for Mayor himself early in the campaign and then dropped out to become Koch’s main political advisor—would become First Deputy Mayor in the new Koch administration. In his brief campaign, Costikyan had delivered himself of views that were by far the most libertarian of any of the candidates in the major parties. Now, however, Costikyan’s post has been demoted to one of several Deputy Mayors, with the result that Costikyan has withdrawn, leaving the field to another Deputy Mayor, former candidate Herman Badillo—whose left-wing proclivities take a back seat only to those of Bella Abzug.

II: THE FLIP FLOP

There is one aspect of the New York mayoral campaign that is not nearly as amusing as the contest between the biggies. And that is the downright grisly showing of the Free Libertarian Party mayoralty candidate. Four years ago, in the 1973 mayoral race, Fran Youngstein vaulted the new Libertarian Party to national prominence (considering the media importance of New York City) by garnering 8,800 votes for the first important race ever run by a Libertarian candidate. The 8,800 votes for this brand-new, unknown party were more than the votes for all the other minor parties combined—parties which had all been around a long time.

Since then, as we have detailed in these pages, the strength of the FLP in New York City—in contrast to the Libertarian Party nationally, or even in upstate New York—has been going steadily downhill, declining both relatively and absolutely in each succeeding election. This year, however, the FLP has hit rock bottom; William F. Lawry, its mayoral candidate, compiled 1,068 votes, a virtually non-existent seven-hundredths of one percent of the total vote. Instead of outpolling all the other minor parties combined, Lawry came in next to last among six minor parties, even losing to something called the City Independent party.

This is a truly disgraceful showing, reflecting the degeneration of the FLP in recent years. Reports are that Lawry, whose campaign was scarcely in evidence, said virtually nothing and scarcely seemed’ libertarian when he did appear. Certainly, he flubbed his golden opportunity, given all minor party candidates, to say his piece on the highly influential New York Times Op-Ed page. Here there was not only little that was identifiably libertarian, but not a word was said about the two major issues for New Yorkers: crime, and the fiscal crisis. Instead, Lawry wrote vaguely about power to the neighborhoods—an issue that has been non-existent in the city for almost a decade.

Let’s face it: the FLP has become an embarrassment, an albatross to the rest of the libertarian movement. The best thing it can do now is to commit hara-kiri, to disappear, to fold its tent and silently steal away. The FLP is already dead; it is high time for it to grasp that fact and act accordingly.

Do You Love Liberty?

by David F. Nolan

In the July issue of Libertarian Forum, Murray Rothbard has let forth with a ringing pronouncement that the “key question” of the day is whether or not one Hates the State.

Those libertarians—anarchist and minarchist alike—whose writings do not seethe with anti-Statist rhetoric are belittled as “amoralist utilitarians” and “plonky conservatives,” while such quasi-libertarians as Mike Royko and Nicholas Von Hoffman are lauded for their “pervasive hatred of the State, of all politicians, bureaucrats, and their clients.”

I understand what Murray is trying to say. At least, I think I do. And it is that the degree of passion one shows in one’s commitment to “the cause” is more important than which side of an ideological hairline one cleaves to.

So far, so good. It is not surprising that Murray should take the side of the ravers—and I mean this with no disrespect, being one myself a fair portion of the time—but I feel that several of his contentions are misplaced.

More specifically, I will submit that the touchstone which distinguishes the True Brethren (and Sistren) from the amoralists and plonks is not hatred of the State, but love of liberty. And this is not as trivial a difference as it might at first seem.

In a way, it seems odd that I should have to point this out. Our “movement,” after all, is identified—by us and by others—as libertarian (pro-liberty), and not simply as anti-state. The reason for this is that there are lots of anti-Statists in the world (e.g. Royko, Von Hoffman, et. al.) and not all of them share our goals—even in a general sense.

The communists, when they are out of power, are self-proclaimed anti-statists they will rant as passionately as any libertarian about causing the state to “wither away.” But that doesn’t mean that they are our philosophical soulmates. The same point can be made about leaders of religious sects in communist-ruled countries, certain black militants, and a whole panoply of bomb-throwers and hijackers. All may use anti-statist rhetoric to equal Sam Konkin’s best—and they may even be sincere in their hatred for the State, at least in its present form. But that doesn’t mean that they’re our comrades in the battle for individual liberty.

Perhaps I am belaboring the point, but I think it needs to be made, and made clearly: We must not fall into the trap of valuing rhetoric over philosophy.

Enough. Let us move onward to other observations prompted by the Good Doctor’s essay.

One: The State, predatory band of criminals though it may be, is not the only source of oppression in the world. Throughout much of Western history, the primary oppressor has been the Church. Specifically, the Roman Catholic Church—often acting through the State, to be sure. And anyone who truly burns with the “spirit of liberty” will oppose oppression from that source—or any other—as strongly as he or she opposes oppression by the State.

The thing which sets libertarians apart from other partisans is a deep, uncompromising commitment to the idea of individual liberty as a natural right—and a fierce determination to combat its foes, from whatever quarter they arise. To make anti-statism (or anti-churchism) per se the litmus test for inclusion in the fellowship of “good guys” is to miss the point and muddy the water.

Two: All other considerations aside, I see nothing to be gained by identifying ourselves as people motivated primarily by hate. Hatemongers, of any stripe, are usually a fairly despicable lot; let us not cast our lot among them. Let us instead hold high the banner of liberty and proclaim our allegiance to our principles. Let’s not be ashamed to say that we love liberty, and make this our rallying cry.

Three: In the same vein, I see no useful purpose in making snide references to patriots. Patriotism means nothing more than love for one’s land and its people, and there is no conflict between libertarianism and patriotism. Patriotism is not love for the State, and the truest patriots are usually those who decry government’s plunder of the people and their land. Let’s make it clear that we understand this distinction!

Hopefully, I have made my point. It may seem like nit-picking to some, but it is my firm belief that our success in the marketplace of ideas will depend largely on how we package our product. And it is to this end that I have made these observations.

The Editor Replies:

I appreciate Dave Nolan’s comments, and he is surely one of that hardy band of laissez-faire radicals that I have been calling for. I don’t see any disjunction, however, between his position and mine. Hate, of course, has had a bad press for a long time, but hatred of the bad is only the other side of the coin of love for the good. Indeed, how can one truly love the good if he does not also, and for the same reason, hate the evil? Libertarians, it seems to me, properly hate the State precisely because they love liberty, and to the same extent.

There are, of course, other aggressors and invaders of liberty than the State: muggers, bank robbers, terrorists, etc. Libertarians don’t particularly focus on these oppressors, however, for two basic reasons: (1) because there is no need—everyone, not just libertarians, opposes and “hates” these aggressors, so there is no special reason for us to pay them much heed; (2) but, on the other hand, only libertarians recognize the State as evil aggressors. To everyone else, the State’s actions have legitimacy and are not recognized as aggression; it is up to us to point out that the State has no clothes. And (3) the State is the major aggressor; random individuals may mug or rob banks; only the State threatens and uses missiles and hydrogen bombs.

I must take issue with Dave, however, on the historical role of the Catholic Church. The Church was never able to commit any oppression except through its influence in using State power; in that sense, it is similar to any other group: business, unions, professional associations etc. which are harmless or beneficial in their private capacity but become oppressors and exploiters when they are able to operate through the State. Moreover, I would venture to say that, on the whole, the Protestant churches have been far more oppressive in the use Of State power than the Roman Catholic. The reason why so many of us tend to think otherwise is that England and America have been infected for centuries by unremitting anti-Catholic propaganda wielded by Protestant moulders of opinion.

I agree wholeheartedly with Dave on his point about patriotism. True patriotism—love of one’s land, culture, etc.—is totally at odds with the phony patriotism, of love for the State; once again, as in so many other cases, a term which was originally libertarian was taken over and perverted for directly opposite purposes.

As for the problems of marketing our ideas, how we package them depends on the audience we are trying to reach with the particular item. The hard-core readership of the Lib. Forum can take the unvarnished truth a lot more easily than, say, the readers of the Chicago Tribune or the watchers of Johnny Carson. And if not in the pages of the Lib. Forum, then where?

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Recently I saw two movies that presented a remarkable contrast. They are not at all similar in theme; but in structure and meaning they embody two diametrically opposed concepts of film-making, indeed of art itself. One is the currently made French turkey, La Grande Bourgeoise— the epitome of the art film, vintage 1977. For an hour and a half, Giancarlo Giannini mopes, Catherine Deneuve looks wooden (which is about all she can do in any case), and several other characters mope. The camera lingers lovingly on closeups of their respective moping. Then there is a brief second or two of action (Giannini murdering the evil husband of his sister Deneuve), and then everybody mopes in spades for another hour or so. While all this is going on, one’s eyes glaze over, and boredom grows and seeps through one’s bones. By the time the so-called climax of the movie creeps into focus, the viewer doesn’t give a tinker’s dam whether or not Deneuve and other assorted atheist-socialist-aristocrats are convicted of aiding and abetting the murder by their reactionary Catholic persecutors. All one cares about is that the picture terminate as quickly and mercifully as possible.

In short, the picture has one point, and nothing is done with it, or rather, the point is repeated endlessly. Minutes drag on and on through an ocean of wasted film and wasted time. To top it all off, the movie was photographed through some sort of haze, presumably to underscore its so-called profundity.

In contrast, I also had the unalloyed pleasure of seeing for the ninth time one of the greatest movies ever made: Pygmalion, vintage Great Britain of the late 1930’s. Instead of hitting the audience over the head at length with one point, Pygmalion was chock-full of points, and spent the minimal possible time on each. As in all other great movies, there was not a wasted second, not a wasted centimeter, in Pygmalion. Every moment was meaningful, and every moment led to the next in an integrated and coherent whole. This sort of movie fascinates rather than bores, and it is eternal. For it bears seeing time and time again, as new insights and nuances are gleaned, and as cherished moments are recognized and remembered by the viewer.

Pygmalion bears comparison, too, to the later musical version of the same play, My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady is a pleasant and enjoyable picture, the music is excellent, the sets and color are sumptuous, but yet it suffers by comparison with Pygmalion. In contrast to the latter’s swift pace and tight structure, Lady was looser and rather flatulent, and considerably longer than Pygmalion’s hour and a half. Despite not being nearly as pretty as Audrey Hepburn, Wendy Hiller’s Liza in the earlier movie was the work of a far superior actress. In particular contrast was the acting in the central role of the film, the linguist Professor Henry Higgins. Rex Harrison, of Lady, is one of the superior movie actors of the last three decades, and his work in this picture did not belie that status. But Leslie Howard’s Henry Higgins was simply magnificent; every gesture, every inflection was inspired and flawless. To use the current jargon, Howard was Henry Higgins: brilliant, scholarly, quirky, abrupt, ill-mannered, blindly tactless while thinking himself the very model of tact, and lovable to the very core. There, dear reader, was acting at its most transcendent, in a picture that—in blazing contrast to the “art film”—is the very model of a great work of art. We must weep for the loss, for the fact that this sort of picture apparently cannot be made or even conceived in today’s world—while we exult in the fact that movies like Pygmalion are immortalized on film.

That Noble Dream

by Justus D. Doenecke

Review of Anne Husted Burleigh, ed., Education in a Free Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973)

Perhaps, just perhaps, you once dreamed of cutting loose from the present educational system and starting one of your own. If so, would your vision go so far as to include planning of faculty, financing, curriculum, and buildings? .

In 1971, the Liberty Fund of Indianapolis sponsored a seminar that centered on just this topic. Participants included an Indiana industrialist, a midwestern economist, a law professor, a historian, and the education columnist for National Review. Burleigh’s anthology contains their position papers, but not the ensuing debate, and adds an essay by Dorothy Sayers, noted novelist and theologian.

The discussion was sharp, as Burleigh notes in her lengthy introduction. Although all contributors shared a common belief in the free-market approach to education, there was much disagreement on other matters. Definitions of the “free society,” “education,” even “understanding” all differed, as did opinions on ethical neutrality, university governance, tenure, and the elective system. Some participants were mainly concerned with economic issues and believed that genuine liberal education could only come with total private support. Others focussed on syllabi and administration, and called for a return to classic academic goals.

“Education is something that happens within an individual. No matter how formally educational the setting or the process, if nothing happens to the supposed learner, nothing educational has taken place.” So wrote Benjamin A. Rogge, Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at Wabash College, and Pierre F. Goodrich, late Chairman of the Board of Ayrshire Collieries Corporation. A college, in other words, should turn the students “upside down,” forcing them to critique all that encompasses conventional wisdom.

The two authors readily admit that the “educated man” is not necessarily the “virtuous man,” a statement that need only receive confirmation by academicians themselves. Yet there is bad education and good education, with the latter—so claim Rogge and Goodrich—fostered by liberal arts institutions in which faculty is selected for teaching skill, no degrees (“meaningless relics from the current system”) or grades are bestowed, and participation is made the key to classroom life.

At the beginning of each term, the college would publish a list of seminars and lectures. The student, having once determined on a course load, would begin by doing some required reading, then enter into small Socratic discussions. Then it’s more reading and more discussion, after which the student would be prepared to listen to a lecture intelligently. Then more discussion, more reading, an the cycle goes on. The thrust here is obvious: to teach is not to manipulate passive minds—or what C. Wright Mills called “happy robots”—but to engage continually in questioning.

Gottfried Dietze, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins, addresses himself to a different issue, for he is grappling with nothing less than the meaning of the modern university. Dietze looks at contemporary education and has the courage to find much of it bad. He opposes student participation in educational policy. Why, he asks, give “those with less knowledge and, therefore, less ability to advance the truth, the same power as those who possess a greater knowledge and ability to do so?” To put “men who have proved their excellence on a par with those who still must, and perhaps never will, prove it” can only “topple the very tenets of education.” (Dietze’s suggestion that instructors should have only one vote in faculty meetings to four for full professors is less wise. How often have young, well-trained instructors been under the control of “old boys” who admit—even boast—that since graduate school they have read little and written less?)

Throughout history, Dietze goes on to note, universities have been manipulated by governments—for “reasons of state”—and he finds that a mindless majoritarianism still threatens the integrity of the academy. He observes how both faculty and students betray academic freedom by intimidation and violence. (He might better note that if violators today usually come from the left, they could spring from the right tomorrow. As Carol Gruber notes in her excellent Mars and Minerva (1975), the pro-war “patriotic” professor of World War I had much to do with originally politicizing the campus.) Students acting illegally, he claims, should be held responsible for damages under civil law, and administrators should never suffer interference with the regular processes of learning. To Dietze, the university exists in order to pursue the truth, a non-political value that can only survive by creating continual barriers against politicization.

Russell Kirk, unquestionably the ablest regular columnist that National Review, offers a model for a revitalized college. In an essay that deserves much reprinting, Kirk posits that a true college exists not to impart skills but “to seek after Wisdom—and through Wisdom, for Truth.” If we might deem his proposals too costly and “visionary” for immediate implementation, they still deserve our respect, for Kirk, like John Henry Newman, is one of the few commentators in any age who has some inkling of what real education is all about. The collective irresponsibility of our colleges, particularly those that ignore curriculum, make Kirk’s points all the more telling.

Newman, in his classic Idea of a University, called liberal discipline “a habit of mind . . . which lasts throughout life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom, or what. . . I have ventured to call the philosophical habit.” (One wonders what Newman would make of the modern faculty meeting). Real education, he said, aims at “the clear, calm, accurate vision and; comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and its own characteristic upon it.” What Newman here is referring to is the capacity to see relationships between things, the capacity to perceive that reality in which particular parts have their full meaning. Kirk concurs, writing what by helping to confer this wise vision, education enables “a man to order his own soul and, thereby, come to a condition of moral worth.”

Of course, Newman made it clear that higher learning improves intellects, not consciences. “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man.” Kirk too distinguishes between knowledge and virtue; yet he affirms with Socrates that right reason can support the cause of virtue. The college, argues Kirk, can give the student the tools for self-instruction, “the enduring truths that govern our being,” principles of self-control, and an ethical consciousness. To use already overused cliches, it can convey the improvement of mind and character.

There is, naturally, quite a different sense in which the university should be ethical, and should be in fact a deeply moral enterprise. It goes far beyond the “Wisdom” and “Truth” Kirk would impart, for it concerns the very process by which one arrives at positions of value. This moral commitment involves lack of exploitation, the absence of coercion, and mutual respect for the positions of others—in other words, a tradition of civility our institutions so often lack.

How best can an institution offer the values Kirk seeks? By returning—he says—to a traditional curriculum, one emphasizing moral philosophy, humane letters (to develop critical powers and not merely “appreciation”), rhetoric, political economy, physics, higher mathematics, biological science (also philosophically considered), classical and modern languages, history, logic, and music and the visual arts stressing history and theory, not craft). By abolishing amorphous survey and general education courses. By abandoning any attempt to reproduce those specialized studies that are the proper province of the graduate school. By keeping the size of the student body within reasonable limits. By reducing electives to a minimum. (“One of the college’s principal strengths was formerly its recognition of order and hierarchy in the higher learning, and the undergraduate is ordinarily not yet capable of judging with discretion what his course of studies ought to be.”) By inculcating “a sense of gratitude toward the generations that have preceded us in time and a sense of obligation toward the generations yet to be born.” (“We moderns,” he writes, “are only dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.”)

Such a school would stress methods of approach, not the gathering of information. Mechanisms include a three year bachelor’s program, thorough and severe testing at (and only at) the end of the academic year, tutorials, private programs of reading and paper-writing, and well-prepared formal lectures that go far beyond the textbook. Each faculty member would have much freedom, “it being clearly understood that he is to teach an intellectual discipline, not some impassioned private doxa.”

Kirk’s concept of education contains much wisdom, for he realizes that serious education involves more than a proliferation of courses according to the interests of the faculty. (One can get many good courses this way but it is a by-product of faculty, not the effect of educational policy), but surely Kirk’s vision is not sufficient, for genuine learning must involve more than the transmission of accumulated wisdom and traditional values. Historian John William Ward likes to cite the time when Erik Erikson was asked what it meant to be a good analyst. “He must be willing to be surprised,” Erikson answered; that is, to be able to cope ;with the unfamiliar. Erikson used to call himself a “systematic participant” in dealing with the lives he observed. Both words are significant; “systematic” means being critical and self-aware, and finally passing responsible judgment on what one at first does pot presume to judge; “participant” means to identify imaginatively with the other. To have both the imaginative identification and systematic criticism is full maturity, or what Erikson called “ego integrity.” For Ward, “it is no less than the condition of being a humane and intelligent person.”

Next in the Burleigh anthology is Henry G. Manne, law professor at the University of Rochester, who deals with university governance. Manne notes the power shift from trustees and presidents to faculty, with results not always beneficial. Since faculty is not held accountable under market pressures, it can pursue research at the expense of teaching, recruit only from similar schools of thought within a discipline, and demand the admission of unqualified members of minorities whom they have no intention of ever teaching. Quite often, students have a legitimate complaint: “A lot of what passes as modern permissiveness at the university level would more accurately be characterized as utter disinterest. Today this is being reflected in such matters as parietal rules, grading policy, so-called bulletin board courses, no attendance requirements, pass-fail grading, and many other devices passed off as innovations.” Manne offers an intriguing solution, but one that needs more explanation: elimination of government operation, state tuition vouchers for any institution of the student’s choice, and de facto ownership by the faculty who would possess share interests in the new university corporation.

Similar concerns with university control come from Stephen J. Tonsor, historian at the University of Michigan and one of the most thoughtful of that highly mixed bag known as conservative intellectuals. Tonsor argues that the university belongs to the whole of society; it is not the property of students, faculty, or any pressure group “that happens to feel a call to revolution or a prophetic mission.” Nor is it, he writes, “a general-purpose social institution. It is not suited to the solution of social problems, the amelioration of misery and misfortune, the reformation of character, or the transformation of culture.” In short, it is neither a center for community organizing, YMCA, T-group, or sanitarium.

Yet, as Tonsor notes, the university has lost its roots, indeed its very reason for being. Hiring practices discriminate against conservatives and Roman Catholics, and such humanistic disciplines as religion are often excluded from the curriculum. Presidents act not like educational statesmen (and indeed many would not know the meaning of either the adjective or the noun) but rather serve as “technicians of adjustment,” playing the kind of broker politics that Theodore Lowi so cogently sees as “the end of liberalism.”

Tonsor’s indictment, perceptive though it is, has a wider application. In the fifties, the Russians launched Sputnik, and schools beefed up science and math; in the sixties people complained of the “unheavenly city” and ruination of the environment, and the academy responded with urban and environmental studies. Demands by black and women’s groups are only the last in a long series. Seldom do institutions ask what role all these areas should play in general education, or what significance such fields have for humane learning. To do so would take some work, and more important, some thinking. It is far easier to give in to an immediate demand on the terms of those who speak the loudest.

Faculty, he notes, realize that rewards lie outside the classroom and no longer take teaching seriously. Their meetings, which resemble nothing so much as the old parliament of Poland, foolishly attempt to legislate in matters of conduct, budget, and administration. Students, though “remarkably ill-prepared to judge or pass on policy,” demand to determine course offerings, pass on questions of academic discipline, and judge appointments, salary increases, and tenure. Tonsor is particularly, and correctly, harsh on the alliance between student activists and administrators: “Both love committee meetings, both place power above principle, and both are deeply anti-intellectual.” The university, Tonsor says, must return to its role as teacher, with research necessary but ancillary to it.

Tonsor’s remedy? Require the student to pay full tuition (accompanied by a generous loan program). Students, having to pay the cost of their education, will appreciate it more; furthermore, they will force—and rightly so—professors to teach three-hour courses per semester and to introduce more relevant courses. In brief, all concerned will become accountable.

It is surprising when a mystery writer has ideas on education, and even more surprising when that writer is a lay theologian. Dorothy L. Sayers, she of “Lord Peter Winsey” fame, calls for a return to the “lost tools of learning.” “For the last 300 years,” she says, “we have been living on our educational capital.” Sayers wrote her essay in 1948 and hence she could declare that students “learn everything except the art of learning.” (Would that we had such anxieties today).

To Sayers, the medieval Trivium offers the correct model, for it teaches pupils how to learn before they start applying themselves to “subjects.” We begin with Grammar, which is best applied to students at the earliest stage of learning, the “Poll-Parrot” stage usually involving years nine to eleven. During this period, memorization is both easy and pleasurable. The best grounding for all education, she claims, is the Latin grammar, and this for several reasons: it is the key to the vocabulary of all the Romance languages, to the structure of the Teutonic languages, and to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences. In addition, it cuts down the labor and pains of learning other subjects by at least fifty per cent.

At this stage, English verse and prose, lyric and narrative, classical myth and English legend should be learned by heart, with recitation practiced aloud. Also history, with stress on dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities; geography, with maps, natural features, and visual presentation of flora and fauna; science, which includes the identifying and naming of specifics (“to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird”); mathematics, which begin with the multiplication table and the grouping of numbers; and theology, that “mistress-science,” in which both the Old and New Testaments are presented as parts of single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption.

We move on to the second stage of learning, the “Pert Age of answering back” and “catching one’s elders out” in interminable argument. Here, from ages twelve to fourteen, it is formal logic, fine demonstration, and well-turned arguments that are crucial, the lynchpin to what the medieval mind referred to as Dialectic. For language, this means syntax, analysis (i.e. the logical construction of speech), and the history of language; for readings, essays, arguments, criticism, and debate; for mathematics, algebra and geometry, both of which should be seen as subdepartments of logic; for history, constitutional history and debates on ethical aims of statesmen; for theology, argument concerning dogma, conduct, and morals.

At some point in the pupil’s development, perhaps around age fourteen, the students will find that their knowledge and experience are not sufficient, and they will enter that even more difficult stage known as the “Poetic Age.” If they now realize that logic and reason have their limits, they find their imagination awakened and they are prepared to study Rhetoric. What was learned by rote through Grammar is now seen in new contexts; what was cold analysis is now brought together in a new synthesis. A certain freedom is allowed, but it must be one that manifests the unity of all branches of learning. Students may specialize, drop certain disciplines, and prepare to specialize in one or two areas. Those who want to go on have the university ahead, and students prepared in this manner should “disconcert” the universities—and do so at age sixteen.

Anyone who has ever met a class might differ with specific recommendations of all of the authors. Financing, curriculum, administrative power, faculty prerogative—all have long been the subject of debate. Sayer might be too rigid, Manne too impractical. Kirk’s model curriculum could—if one were not careful—lead simply to producing people of smug if learned gentility. (Kirk claims to welcome residential fraternities, those twentieth century microcosms of Pierre Boule’s “planet of the apes.” Yet these weird repositories of “higher scholarship” are not always the best device for achieving the radical transformation sought by Rogge and Goodrich.) Academe, like many other institutions, reflects its society, and one cannot restore order to the self, much less to the university, if it is absent in the general society. Order for order’s sake is folly at any rate; it is the process of finding order that is so crucial, and that shows that one is educated.

What is common and significant to all contributors is the sense that education is a vocation, what Luther referred to as a “calling”, and that institutions that lose this sense do so at their peril. The authors offer ways through which they think this sense of vocation can be recovered. Education in America, if it is to survive, needs more academics who share their enthusiasm for learning, and their integrity and courage in approaching the task. In a very real sense, they have kept the faith.

Public Parks: the New York City Case

by Walter Block

Everyone knows that the system of public parks in New York City is a mess. Our city parks have become havens for muggers and junkies, unsafe for honest citizens except perhaps in broad daylight on summer weekends. With the exception of Central Park, virtually all the city parks are spread around the periphery of Manhattan, where they are all but impossible to reach. Tourists on the Circle Line boat cruise are likely to conclude that virtually all of Manhattan is composed of parks; but we occupants of the barren inland know better, unfortunately. As for the pitifully few inland “vest pocket parks”, they are in danger of becoming obsolete.

In Tudor City, a group of elderly people have formed the Save Our Parks Committee, to stop Tudor City’s owner, the Helmsley Spear real estate firm, from erecting a 52 story residential and office building on the site of two small parks on East 42nd Street near the U.N. Predictably, the politicians of the area have rallied to the cause of saving the park, and have criticized the greedy profit-seeking landlord. The problem with the facile answer of supporting the park however is that on the one hand, we also have a housing shortage and perhaps the park should be replaced by housing. On the other hand, it may indeed be true that the park shortage is even greater than the housing shortage, and then we should not only save these small parks, but should replace some housing with parks. The real problem of the park system in New York City is not whether we should save these two small parks, important as that may be. The real problem is that we lack a mechanism by which these and all similar problems can be solved automatically.

When the problem of how to allocate our scarce resources among competing ends arises in other areas, we have an answer that has served us well. It has served us so well, in fact, that it can only be folly to ignore its application to the present problem. I speak, of course, of the price system. If there were ever to arise a problem of allocating scare resources between shoes and wheat of the sort that has arisen between parks and housing, where there a “shoes faction” opposed a “wheat fraction”, the price system would solve this problem in short order. (Indeed, the very ludicrousness of the example strongly suggests that the price system does not even allow such problems to arise in the first place.) For the good in relatively short supply would rise in price as unsatisfied demanders bid for it. If wheat were more scarce, the price of wheat would rise relative to shoes. Then wheat producers would be able to bid land and labor and other scarce factors of production away from the shoe producers.

How would the price system work in the case of parks? The City government would denationalize the park industry. It would sell off all its park lands to private entrepreneurs who would have the option of maintaining the land in the form of a park or converting it to some other use. These entrepreneurs would charge prices for the use of parks just as is done in the form of single entry admissions, season tickets, or any other plan amenable to both park owner and customer.

The advantages of the plan would be immediate. No longer would the park-using public have to fear for its very life. What would solve the problem of crime in the parks would not be simply more police or better lighting or any of the other specific measures often proposed by the bureaucrats in charge of parks. What will solve the problem is rather a system which will automatically reward those entrepreneurs who are able to rid the parks of crime by whatever methods they adopt, and a system which will automatically penalize those entrepreneurs who are unable to rid the parks of crime. The profit and loss system, or the price system, will give rise to a whole host of park owners, each free to use his own methods. Those who succeed will be rewarded by the patronage of the customers, will prosper, and will be able to spread their enlightened methods to other parks. Those who fail will lose customer support, will lose money and go bankrupt, and will no longer be in position to mismanage parks. It is in this way that the price system will improve the safety of parks.

The same analysis holds true for other facets of park operation; the location of the park in the first place, the other services provided by park managers, etc.: those entrepreneurs who please the customers will prosper, and those who do not will fail. It is in this way, and this way alone, that we are likely to have the parks relocated to where they are more accessible, that we are likely to see the parks open at night, etc.

The radical thing about this proposal is not the use of the price system itself, which is used in all aspects of our economic life, but rather the application of it to an area in which it had never been used before. Unfortunately, we are such slaves to the past that it is extremely difficult to imagine alternative ways of doing things, where the alternatives would replace institutions that have been with us for many years. Objection to new ways arise which would never occur to us but for their newness. For example, if the government had been in the business of providing shoes and wheat in much the same way that it is now in the business of providing parks, fire protection, postal service, etc., and if someone were to come forward with a proposal to turn the production of shoes and wheat over to private enterprise, all sorts of objections would probably arise which from our present vantage point of experience would appear to be frivolous: “How would the farmers bring the wheat to market?”, “Who would sew the soles and shoe tops together?”, “How would the merchants be able to charge for the shoes?”, “Who would bake the bread?”, “How would we decide on the proportion of wheat allocated to bread and to cake?”, and especially, “But the poor would be forced to go without shoes!”. From the vantage point of experience, we know all these’ objections about shoes and wheat to be baseless. But they are very potent indeed with regard to the de-nationalization of parks, an action where we have no experience to guide us.

Let us consider in some detail the claim that the poor would be forced to go without the use of parks, since we have dealt with the other objections with regard to parks, at least briefly. It is true that poor people and poor children (along with everyone else) will be forced to pay for the park services they consume under a system of private ownership of the parks, just as they are now forced to pay for the shoes and wheat they consume. But it by no means follows that the poor will not be able to enjoy the use of parks, or even that they will be forced to curtail their use of parks! If anything, the de-nationalization of our parks will probably mean more park use by the poor, not less.

For ons thing, the poor, along with everyone else, will be able to make better use of private parks because they will tend to be run more efficiently under the price system. No longer will the parks be out of service because of uncontrolled crime, improper lighting, or defective equipment. Government bureaucratic park managers receive their salary regardless of consumer satisfaction; entrepreneurs do not. But more importantly, we must realize that the effect of the present system of nationalized parks is to divert recreational funds away from poor people and toward rich people. Therefore, denationalizing the park industry will have the effect of increasing, not decreasing, the amount of park services that go to the poor!

Although it is true that the New York City government does spend some thousands of dollars on building and maintaining asphalt playgrounds and swimming pools used mainly by the poor, it severely taxes recreations mainly attended by the poor, such as professional baseball, football, and basketball games, bowling alleys and pool halls, etc. The city government then takes these and other tax funds and subsidizes recreational activities mainly patronized by the rich to the tune of literally billions of dollars. The priceless art treasures in our museums and art galleries, the millions of dollars that go into our libraries, ballet and opera companies, symphony orchestras, Shakespeare Festivals, etc., all represent recreational money taken away from the poor and given to the rich. Can it then be seriously maintained that stopping this process by getting the government out of the recreation business will actually be detrimental to the poor? Hardly.

No. The answer to the physical and spiritual decay of our nationalized recreational industry can only be a separation of recreation and state akin to the separation of church and state mandated by the constitution. And such a separation can only help the poor, the greatest victims of state depredations.

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Abortion: An Exchange

To the Editor of the Lib. Forum:

I found your arguments on abortion (Lib. Forum, July 1977) cogent and well structured. I can agree with what you say. However, you did not address the aspect of abortion which causes me the greatest concern.

Actions have consequences which, to my mind, must be accepted going in, especially when they are clear and certain. One of the potential consequences of sexual intercourse is pregnancy. If the participants voluntarily enter into this action with a knowledge of the possible consequences, I think they must accept them. If the act is involuntary, they need not.

Whether one can speak of a “contract” (an obligation resulting from a known consequence would be more appropriate) between mother and fetus hinges on whether the action was voluntary. Further, since the action has possible consequences, a “birth control mistake” is one of the possibilities which needs to be considered. Finally, if it is voluntary, why should a person not be permitted to surrender his body “in an enforceable transaction,” even to sell himself into slavery for a specified time, if he wishes.

R. B. Peirce

The Editor Replies:

Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I confess that I cannot understand your point about “accepting” all the consequences of one’s voluntary actions. Where is it written that one “must accept” such consequences? Suppose that A attends a meeting at which B has a bad cold, and, further, that A entered into the meeting with the full knowledge that B had such a cold. Must we say that A “must accept” the possible cold because he entered into the meeting voluntarily? Does this mean that A can’t take aspirin, Vitamin C, or whatever in an attempt to fend off the unwelcome consequences of an action which he otherwise benefited from or enjoyed? This strikes me as a bizarre position indeed, and the hangover from a Puritan ethic that one must accept uncomplainingly the bitter with the batter. Why? Why can’t one take a second action which will annul the unpleasant consequences of a first action? Why can’t one take Vitamin C to annul cold germs?

Another example: A gets drunk one night, gets a hangover the next ?morning. Is it morally impermissible for him to take some hangover remedy, because then A is not “accepting the consequences” of his own voluntary action? Why is it impermissible—apart from the Puritan position that pain must accompany every enjoyment? Yet Mr. Peirce and his fellow-thinkers would precisely have to take such bizarre positions.

Professor Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her brilliant defense of abortion cited in our July issue, deals with such arguments by posing the cause of a person who leaves his window open, thereby facilitating the entrance of a burglar into the house and the theft of his valuables. Does this mean that the houseowner had no right to open the window, or that he was in some way “responsible” for the burglar’s invasion, and that therefore the homeowner has the right to do whatever he wishes with his own property. It is monstrous to say that he is in some way responsible for the theft, thereby taking the burglar off the hook, because the burglar’s task thereby became easier. There is no moral obligation for an innocent homeowner to live in a fortress. In the same way, it is as absurd to blame the mother for a birth control mistake as it is to blame the homeowner for the “open window mistake.” The burglar was the invader; in the same way, with a birth control mistake, the fetus is the invader. In neither case, can we get the invader off the hook because of some arbitrary theory that an innocent person “must accept all the consequences of his voluntary actions”—from leaving a window open to using a non-fool-proof contraceptive.

Similar to arguments attempting to blame the homeowner were the repugnant commercials a few years ago blaming the car-owner for the theft of his car if he had left his keys in the car. In some way, then, the car-owner, instead of righteous innocence, is supposed to feel guilty for leading the poor teen-age criminal astray. I say “balderdash!”

As for your point on voluntary slavery, I can only reiterate my previous article. There is nothing wrong with “surrendering one’s body” voluntarily, but that is not the issue. The issue is, after the person changes his mind, the enslavement is no longer voluntary; it then becomes compulsory. Now what?

The Sadat Hype

The media, of course, loved the trip–as well they might, since it was virtually designed as a media event. The trip was heavy on the symbolism and on the pictorials: the president of Egypt flying into Israel, laying Israeli as well as Egyptian wreath at soldiers’ graves, speaking before the Israeli Knesset on world-wide satellite television. All over the world, the hearts of millions of the hoodwinked leaped at the thought of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

The gentlemen cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. Even on the level of the trip itself, and of immediate Israeli-Egypt relations, it is hard to see what the Sadat excursion accomplished. A few phone lines were opened between the two countries, but so what? Sadat reiterated the traditional Egyptian demands, both sides talked of peace, peace but Israeli concessions were non-existent. The strange thing is that, in a normal dramatic trip of this sort, important concessions and agreements would have been worked out secretly in advance, so that the public would be conned into believing that the trip itself generated the dramatic agreement announced at the climactic conclusion of the journey. But in the case of the Sadat trip, there was no dramatic relations between the two countries, was all show and flash and no substance. One would think that the media would have caught on, but perhaps that’s too much to expect.

Hints in the press about possible secret but unspecified concessions made by Israel are hardly convincing. If there are such concessions, why weren’t they worked out before the trip, and announced as its supposedly successful climax?

There is even a deeper flaw with all the hoopla over the Sadat trip. And that is that nothing in the long run, nothing in solving the deeper problems in the Middle East, can be accomplished by Egypt and Israel alone. Even if Sadat and Begin danced the hora all over Tel Aviv, the great problem of the Middle East—what to do about the rights of the Palestinians—would be no closer to a solution. For neither the Egyptian government nor any other government in the Middle East—whether Arab or not—is qualified to speak for and negotiate for the Palestinian people. Only Palestinians are so qualified, and Israel continues to refuse even to meet with their representatives. And that, of course, means real Palestinians, as overwhelmingly embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization, and not a couple of Palestinian-American university professors who represent only themselves, as one trial balloon floated by Sadat has proposed. Of course, simply meeting with the Palestinians will scarcely serve to bring about peace, but such continuing meeting is at least the necessary condition for such a settlement. And there is no sign whatever that such a meeting is one iota closer than before Sadat’s grandstand journey.

In fact, paradoxically, the long-run consequences of the Sadat visit may be the diametric opposite of what the world media have been proclaiming. Predictably, the conservative Arab states such as Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the influential Saudi Arabia and its client states—governments who have never displayed much interest in the rights of the Palestinians—have come to support the Sadat visit. Predictably, also, the radical “rejectionist” Arab states such as Iraq and Libya have condemned the trip with great passion, calling for “spilling the blood of the traitor Sadat” and for the overthrow of the Sadat regime. But more important is the reaction of the centrist bloc of Arab states, headed by Syria. It was Syria’s violent rightward turn against the Lebanese Left which dealt a body blow to the PLO and to the Palestinian guerrillas inside Lebanon. But now Syria and the centrist states have been radicalized leftward by their outrage at the Sadat trip, and Syria is in the process of mobilizing a far wider “rejection front” than anyone would have thought possible a few scant months ago.

The rejection front began with the dissident Palestinian guerrillas who had broken with Fateh (the dominant force within the PLO). These guerrillas were led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, headed by Dr. George Habash, and were supported by Libya and Iraq, who, however, happen to be geographically far from the Israeli fighting front. Fateh and the majority of the PLO were willing to go along with the solution to the Middle East cooked up by the U.S. State Department doves—abandonment by Israel of its post-1967 conquests, and the creation of a mini-Palestine state in the newly abandoned areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in return for which the new mini-State would pledge never to try to acquire the remainder of Palestinian territory under Israeli dominion, a pledge to be guaranteed by the Great Powers, the United Nations or whatever. With this “1967 solution” looking increasingly dim, especially with the hard-line hawk Menachem Begin in in command of Israel, a new and far stronger “rejection front” seems to be looming—this time including the PLO, Syria and the centrist Arab states.

All this does not mean, however, any imminent resumption of full-scale, conflict. On the contrary, the current uneasy condition of no war-no peace is likely to continue indefinitely and considerably into the future. For the Palestinians and their Arab allies might now be nudged into doing some reexamining of another Habash “rejection front” tenet that they had’ brusquely dismissed as defeatist and as taking too much time: namely, that Israel cannot be vanquished nor Palestinian rights achieved until such conservative Arab governments as that of Egypt and Jordan are: overthrown and replaced by pro-Palestinian radicals. In short, that from the point of view of the Palestinians, their main strategic enemy in the current historical period is not Israel, but within the Arab world.