Re: [A-List] Haiti Erupts

["Anyutka" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

Lew Rockwell is a great optimist, which always amazes me - the me,
who is mostly dispirited these days over US wars, economic exploitation,
and the grotesque growth of Fedgov.  And that's one big reason why I always
read Lew's columns; they give me hope and renew my energies. (One other
person, whose views were the exact opposite of Lew's had the same effect
on me - and that was Mark Jones.  I just loved communicating with Mark, I
always came away more determined, more hopeful for the future.)
I found Lew's column today particularly effective, and that A-Listers might
feel their own wings lifted a bit...true, this is from an entirely different
political
perspective than most on the list, but the A-List is very much a part of the
phenomenon Lew hails - and, across the political board, salutes. -A.


The New Intellectuals

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.


It might be illusion, or it might just be reality, that the entire Bush
presidency and everything for which it stands is in a state of slow
collapse. It is slowly dawning on people that the whole rationale for the
billions spent, the tens of thousands of dead, and all the hysteria, was a
hoax. Of course the same could be said of most or all wars. Why is the truth
making a difference this time? Because ideas have been denationalized, and
the world populated for the first time in fifty years with independent
intellectuals.

Hear me out.

After World War II, academia went through a dramatic change for the worse.
It was simultaneously democratized and given the primary mission of serving
the state. The GI Bill (a vast expansion of ill-gotten gains pumped into
academia) did the democratizing work, not because the political elite
thought everyone should get a degree but because they feared mass
unemployment and had too little confidence in the market to absorb returning
soldiers. The change in the mission of academia was nothing more than a
continuation of wartime culture over which the state was completely
dominant.

Not only academia changed. The years between 1944 and 1949 - Marshall Plan,
GI Bill, the Cold War, fiscal and monetary planning, cultural and economic
regimentation - set the stage for the next half century. The state secured
many (though not all) of its gains made during wartime and the effects
rippled throughout American society. To be professionally ambitious meant to
keep a constant eye on the centralized edifice to see what its priorities
were. It was clear to all that the state was the prime mover, the first
cause of all important events.

We know what it is like in our time to suffer under a state that uses events
as a form of political intimidation to shut down critics. Object to the
police state in our time and you confront teeming hordes of bureaucrats and
state apologists screaming "9-11" at you. Back then it was worse. The
terrifying power of the state throughout the war (drafting, taxing,
planning, censoring), and then at Nagasaki and Hiroshima (instant torching
of mass civilian populations) was the psychological lever by which the state
effectively nationalized the culture - far more completely and effectively
then now.

Intellectuals were owned. Whether in academia or journalism, everyone who
aspired to think and exercise intellectual influence knew the right course
of action. The state was where the action was. In journalism, the answer was
to attend the right schools where you learned the ropes and went to work for
a major network or print outlet, and very few could be described as
independent. Political scientists had one charge: make the state run more
efficiently. The same was true of economists. To be a success meant to work
your way up to the President's Council of Economic Advisers. It was a
science of planning, and Keynes was its muse.

In the same way that a socialized economy cannot put new technology into
effect, and thus yields no civilizational advance, the world of ideas was
frozen into a pattern that was fixed and unchanging. There were official
texts, official journals, official schools from which all lower schools took
their marching orders, and public schools became extensions of this
overarching, top-down system of idea enforcement. Christian churches put US
flags in their sanctuaries, baseball fans sang the national anthem, American
families had the president's picture on the wall, as did children's TV
shows, and everyone watched the same news anchors and read the same news
feeds. There was a national culture that the neocons say we should
recapture - and it was awful.

"If you are trained to be uncritical of the military, you can easily go a
little further and learn to be uncritical of government and authority,"
writes Paul Fussell, "and even to be uncritical of all established and
received institutions. The ultimate result is the death of the mind, the
transformation of the higher learning and independent scholarship into a
cheering section for whatever popular notions and superstitions prevail at
the moment. what is clear about the culture of war is that it is necessarily
an obedience culture.. The obedience culture is certain over the long-run to
shrivel originality and to constrict thought, to encourage witless
adaptation and social dishonesty." (Costs of War, ed. Denson, pp. 355).

Were there no dissidents? There were a few, but recall that the Old Right
intellectual movement had pretty well been killed off by the war and Pearl
Harbor. FDR's unrelenting campaign against his critics, combined with the
massive power of the presidency, had an effect. Critics were dead or silent.
The Taft forces in the House and Senate had their moments in beating back
some legislation, but it wasn't long until they too met the fate of all
opponents of the Establishment in those days: they were smeared and crushed
by the onrushing Cold War leviathan.

A few institutes and institutions worked to break through, but it took
massive efforts and those who dared poke their head out of the trenches were
fired on mercilessly. Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education
was hauled before a Congressional hearing to account for his antiwar stance.
The John Birch Society was smeared as a hate group. The American right wing
was reconstituted as nothing but an intellectual arm of the warfare state,
publishing a fortnightly that counseled expanding the US military empire,
suppressing civil liberties, working within the system, and retreating on
most every other front.

Only by looking back at this tableau of fifty years ago does the striking,
remarkable, reality of today come through. If you just take a look at the
free-market right in this country, and the sheer number of publications,
conferences, academic journals, and scholars, it is a picture of exuberance
and productivity unknown in the 20th century. It is very likely today that
you will find the same intellectuals writing for academic journals as well
as blogging on their favorite website or writing for newspapers - something
unheard of in the old days. The new academic class of 30-somethings does not
feel itself kept in any sense. They obey the social controls of the new PC
university, but otherwise think and say what they wish.

The best journals today are not published by universities or large
publishing houses, but by non-profits such as the Mises Institute, the
Independent Institute, the Acton Institute, and many, many others. These are
journals that seek to make a difference in the world. They aren't just
manuals for state planning, as academic journals used to be. In books, no
one takes marching orders from nationally approved lists as people did in
generations past. As for news sources, you know the story: the cartel has
been entirely smashed. The prominence of libertarian ideas in the debate
today is notable, but what is most striking is the presence of debate at
all! And the left does great good in exposing the nefarious plans of the
Republicans, and drumming up antiwar sentiment.

Something resembling a free market in ideas is present today in a way in
which it was not in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The debate, the
conversation, is not national but global, and it goes on constantly in
forums so numerous that it is impossible to keep up. The spread and speed of
ideas makes it impossible for the state to manage opinion with anywhere near
the degree of control it once had. Time was when a president on a major
network spoke ex cathedra. Now he is subject to relentless criticism and
even ridicule.

The Bush administration has never understood the changed political and
cultural environment which it inherited when it took office. It operated on
the old assumption that controlling the state and its major adjunct
industries was enough to carry the day. To supercharge an economy and win a
war was simply a matter of will and money. The lies were seen as an
incidental, inevitable, and wholly justifiable part of statecraft.

But we live in times that devour anyone who aspires to be the one
all-controlling national or international will. Real intellectuals - and
they are everywhere today - will never stand for it. What has made the
difference? Technology? Sure. Maybe the day of the monolithic nation state,
managed from the top down, has just run its course. Or maybe the work of
those who dared dissent from approved opinion in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and
70s, is finally coming to fruition. Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and all the
other courageous people who never bought the line back then, gave a great
gift to the world, which we are just now unwrapping.

February 12, 2004

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com and author of
Speaking of Liberty.

Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com

Lew Rockwell Archives