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Going, Going... Gone Digital!
April 28, 2005 | 0 comments
TAS Live
A Conversation With Irving Kristol
In honor of Irving Kristol, who died today, we reprint this discussion about the state of liberalism, from our May 1969 issue.
(Page 2 of 3)
TYRRELL: Has it had unfortunate consequences?
KRISTOL: Obviously, yes. You know, John Dewey was against censorship and for freedom, but John Dewey, were he alive today, would be absolutely horrified at the things that are being done in the name of free creativity. This is not what he had in mind.
TYRRELL: In a recent New York Times article you said the church and family left it to schools to transmit values. Now the schools are neglecting this. Why is this undesirable? Aren't our traditional values rather corrupt? Isn't western civilization about to fall apart from exhaustion?
KRISTOL: Oh, I don't know what that means. Civilizations have a way of not falling apart all that easily. Are our values corrupt? In a way they are. I don't know that they're more corrupt than the values of other civilizations, though I might even concede that in some senses they are. On the other hand, these are the values that regulate the way we live together. And even if they may be false in certain important respects, they simply can't be shoved aside; people cannot live in a vacuum. False values are better than none. And until these values are amended and improved, we'll have to cope with them as best we can.
TYRRELL: Do you agree with Frank Meyer when he says western civilization is superior to all other civilizations because it stresses the primacy of the individual? No other civilization places so much importance on the individual.
KRISTOL: Yes, I would agree with that. On the other hand, it has paid a price for this. And everyone is now becoming aware of the price, that western individualism does create tremendous strains upon the individual, and does produce tremendous strains within the community, and is corrosive of many of the things that even Frank Meyer would cherish. It is very hard to be for tradition, for instance, and at the same time to celebrate the unqualified virtues of individualism. On the whole I'm in sympathy with — I mean, as I say, being a product of western civilization — I'm irrevocably more individualist than, for instance, any Buddhist is likely to be. On the other hand, this civilization has created problems for itself.
TYRRELL: You once drew a distinction between the hippie and the new left. Do you still make that distinction or do you see a convergence in certain situations?
KRISTOL: I honestly don't know. I mean they're
obviously converging in some respects. The appearance of — I
think they call themselves the Yippies — would seem to indicate
that some people feel an amalgamation or a merger is possible.
And in the abstract, there is no reason why it shouldn't take
place. I think there is one obstacle to a full-scale merger,
which is that the new left, if it ever is really going to do
anything politically, has to create a disciplined organization
out of people who are "high" half the time, who don't come to
meetings on time, who are not responsible for the execution of
small assignments and so on.
TYRRELL: You mentioned, in the NEW YORK TIMES, that you
felt the hippie was interested in moral ends. Can you explain
that?
KRISTOL: Well, let me say this in favor of the hippies and even of the new left. They have done what our academic political thinkers have singularly failed to do over, the past eighty or ninety years. That is, they have challenged the values and the ends of bourgeois society. Not just pointing to its imperfections, but saying "Is this the kind of society we want to have?" And "Is this the kind of life we want to live?" Now these are the traditional problems of political philosophy. But they have not been discussed by political philosophers in any serious way within this century. Political philosophy has taken a completely different turn.
TYRRELL: Well, I’m reading a book by Richard Weaver right now. He certainly seems to be interested in the quality of life one leads.
KRISTOL: Yes, but Richard Weaver is a sport.
He's an exception. Hardly anyone in philosophy courses at a
university reads Richard Weaver, except in a few places. He's not
regarded as an important American philosopher.
TYRRELL: Why?
KRISTOL: Well because his whole approach to
philosophy deals with problems that modern philosophy has
abandoned. Modern philosophy is overwhelmingly analytical. It
does not feel that it has any authority even to discuss the ends
of man, the ends of society. It feels it has nothing to say about
that. All it can do is criticize the way in which other people
discuss the ends of society. Similarly political theory and
political philosophy say they have no competence to discuss the
ends of political society. All they can do is discuss the
mechanisms whereby people reach whatever ends they assign to
themselves. I therefore think it is true that a good deal of
modern academic thinking, especially in the humanities and those
social sciences which are closest to the humanities, I do think
that these disciplines are not "relevant", as the younger people
say. These disciplines do not respond to the basic questions
which any sensitive and intelligent young person wants to see
discussed — not only wants to see discussed, but wants to discuss
and explore for himself. And so I have a certain sympathy with
the hippies and the new left because I do think that for the
first time in many decades they are posing before this society
some philosophical questions — real fundamental questions, which
the academics have been avoiding very diligently now for quite a
few decades.
TYRRELL: Well this anticipates a later question of mine.
It seems to me, that the young right has been asking these
questions also, though they are not so darlingized for their
utterances. Is there a convergence here of the left and the
right, the young left and the young right?
KRISTOL: I think there's a convergence of youth, yes. The young people of this country today are bored with a lot of the sterile academicism. Now mind you, I must be careful about this. So often when young people denounce their studies as "irrelevant," very often that is simply an exercise in anti-intellectualism— that is, they don't want to read Plato because he is very hard, and he lived a long time ago, and the meaning of what he said is not instantly obvious. And I certainly don't want to pander to any such sentiments. On the other hand, there's also no doubt that students, especially in the humanities, and especially in the so-called softer social sciences — areas which traditionally used to deal with the basic issues of human existence, human society and human life — find that these disciplines have abandoned that field. And the result is that the field has been invaded by all sorts of quackeries, all sorts of amateur philosophies. I think that, in this respect, young people both of left and of right have a very legitimate complaint.
TYRRELL: You don't feel affluence plays that great a role?
KRISTOL: I think affluence does play a role, but in certain special ways. I don't think what you call affluence has corrupted the soul of the average American because the average American just isn't that affluent. After all, when a man's annual income moves from $6000 to $8000, this does not permit him to live like a lord or a king. And the difference is not of an order that is likely to greatly affect his moral values. When we talk in the mass, these are the kinds of changes w e are talking about; that is, the movement towards affluence among the mass of Americans has been relatively small as far as its affects on daily living is concerned. Instead of living in an apartment you live in a house. But the house, after all, is not a lavish thing — I mean, most Americans live in quite modest houses. And, as I say, moving from $6000 a year to $8000 a year or from $7000 a year to $10,000 a year (which is almost a 50 % increase) does not transform a person's values. But where affluence has played a role, a very important role, is among young people. It is the young people in our society today who are far, far more affluent than young people ever were. And affluent not only in the sense that they have more pocket money, but that they have control over resources. For instance, the whole transformation of the mass media that we have been witnessing in the past ten years or fifteen years is to a very large extent a response to the affluence of young people. These people are consumers. The record industry sells its products to young people; television orients itself more and more to young spenders. The affluence of young people has, I think, had a tremendous effect upon our entire culture, much more so than the affluence of the average American, or even of the rich American.
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Interested Conservative| 9.18.09 @ 6:40PM
"But I don't think anyone, young or old, has the right to be mindless. I think they must analyze the causes of the condition they seek to cure and the consequences of the cures they recommend. And what alarms me about the new left is that it is the politics of expressionism."
And there you have Obamism in whole, prophesied two score years ago.
PS - love the coinage "darlingized". Very perky and Couricish!
Nick| 9.18.09 @ 8:15PM
I was a year and a half old when this interview took place.
And since I received my education of this period through the mediums of television and movies, which means I got the left-wing spin/lies growing up, I am always struck by how much we are arguing about the same things we were 40 years ago.
Or is it just that the left is using the same, lame talking points. More precisely, they don't have the intellect to come up with new arguments.
That's what the late Mr. Kristol seems to have said about the new left 40 years ago.
R.I.P., and my prayers to his family.
Alan Brooks| 9.18.09 @ 8:21PM
"This is not the most beautiful of all societies and this is not even the most civilized of all societies. "
Scandinavia is the most "civilized" of all 'societies';
but globalization will seep in and ruin Scandinavia like everywhere else.
Pingback| 9.18.09 @ 8:35PM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : A Conversation With Irving Kristol [ links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Alan Brooks| 9.18.09 @ 8:36PM
Kristol and I have-- had-- much in common, because of our backgrounds we saw Communists close up, and at best they are unintentionally destructive; at worst they are genocidal.
Mary Louise| 9.18.09 @ 9:32PM
But basically I really do think this was a program of, one might almost say, the modern world, since very few people opposed it. It was the program of modern liberalism and even of much of modem conservatism. And no one expected it to have such cataclysmic consequences.
I think Moynihan did expect it to have such cataclysmic consequences. IIRC, he lamented the hapless matriarchal state of the black family around this time. Who really couldn't see that a home without a Dad would find that Mom and child looking for the head of the family elsewhere?
In a Country where women had greater freedom than in other parts of the world, these women seemed to despise their men and then their men grew to despise them in return.
Mary Louise| 9.18.09 @ 10:49PM
Contentions opens up the Vault.
"When I taught a graduate seminar in social thought, my classes tended to be dominated by young Marxists and quasi-Marxists. We used to read The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx launches a vitriolic attack on the bourgeois family as an institution of legalized prostitution for the unfortunate wives. I once asked my students what they thought of these remarks but got no response—it was clear that they preferred not to think about them, though they regarded The Communist Manifesto as a kind of scripture. I then asked whether they thought their mothers were prostitutes. An uneasy and baffled silence ensued. What I found and still find fascinating is less the fact that no one had the courage to say “yes” than the fact that no one had the courage to say “no.” Keeping their Marxism intact was obviously more important to them than anything else."
Mary Louise| 9.19.09 @ 10:53AM
More from Link text. Isn’t it wonderful to have lived a life that causes so many people to miss you?
I’m grateful to his wife too, she helped me understand something extremely important and integral.
From linked piece:
***The Third World uses the UN when it can, ignores it when convenient. So do the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries. There is no “community of nations,” and the grand principles of the UN Charter are cynically abused for the purposes of Realpolitik. The United States is being forced to choose between being an active, great power in the world as it exists, or gradually retiring into a quasi-isolationism that leaves our moral purity undefiled and the world to its own devices.
The Democratic party today, and especially its most liberal wing, is clearly moving toward this second alternative. It is a movement made all the easier by the unspoken (because uneasy) liberal assumption that left-wing totalitarian movements, paying lip-service to principles that have a superficial affinity with liberal ideas, will evolve into less totalitarian and more liberal regimes. This assumption flies in the face of the fact that the most evident political reality of the 20th century is the revolt against the liberal economic and political order and the liberal ideal of self-government. That this revolt is sometimes explicitly “reactionary” or sometimes “progressive” in its political metaphysics is of interest to historians of ideas, but has little bearing on the construction of foreign policy. Indeed, what is most striking in recent decades is the convergence between yesteryear's totalitarian governments of the Right and today's totalitarian regimes of the Left. The similarities between Castro's Cuba and Mussolini's Italy are far more striking than their differences.***
In the same piece he writes this:
***One can muddle through with such incoherence and schizophrenia for a while, but sooner or later the world demands that one talk sense.***
I think it’s so beautiful, and of the same great cast of mind as this from Bibi’s recent speech in which he gives us the words of Theodor Herzl. Emphasis is mine
***In his speech at the Zionist Congress in Basel, in speaking of his grand vision of a Jewish homeland for the Jewish People, Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the State of Israel, said: This is so big, we must talk about it only in the simplest words possible.***
Neal Freeman| 9.19.09 @ 10:53AM
Just one story about Irving. Back in the Nixon days, Irving and I found ourselves quarantined as "the conservatives" on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board. We were outnumbered 13 to two. The general atmosphere in which public TV operated was even m0re skewed: among the cultural elites, Nixon's standing was somewhere between, oh, Beck and Palin. At a funding meeting one day, we sat through a long presentation of upcoming specials and series, many of them of the "The Rosenberg Case Reconsidered" or "The Rape of Our Planet" stripe. When the Chairman asked for comments, Irving tossed his thick binder to the middle of the conference table, smiled and said, "It's a catalog of liberal chic. Record me as voting against all of it." The meeting ended in chaos, which was pretty much all we could hope for. In many ways over many years, Irving was the indispensable man.
S.L. Toddard| 9.19.09 @ 11:31AM
It is sad that we don't have so many important, influential intellectuals anymore. I believe Kristol's ideas have done profound, perhaps irreversible damage to America and her institutions. But we were once a country that seriously considered ideas. Where people whose job it was to think deeply had influence. It's sad that that's no longer the case. People who have run out of ideas do not last much longer.
Rest in peace, Irving Kristol.
John II| 9.19.09 @ 3:58PM
Yes, for sure: a gentle RIP for Irving K.
Yet allow me nonetheless to attempt the daunting task of cheering you up, Toddard, if you'll allow me to avoid the term "intellectual." I prefer the term "thinker," since "intellectual" has about it the smell of the French philosophe. I learned to avoid the term after reading Thomas Molnar's 1961 take-down of the species--and by the way, I think Molnar is still alive. So perhaps you can add him to the following very partial list:
Nicholas Eberstadt
Robert P. George
Leon R. Kass
Irwin Stelzer
Martin Feldstein
Kay Hymowitz
Wilfred M. McClay
Diani Schaub
James Q. Wilson
R.R. Reno
Hadley Arkes
Midge Decter
Mary Ann Glendon
Russell Hittinger
Michael Novak
George Weigel
Robert Louis Wilken
Yuval Levin
James Nuechterlein
David B. Hart
Charles Murray
Bradford Wilcox
J. Budziszewski
Roger Scruton (a Brit with Americano influence)
Victor Davis Hanson
Joseph Bottum
James V. Schall . . .
. . . well, I hope you get the drift. I could go on, and I apologize for not alphabetizing the partial list, but hey, those names just popped off the top of my noggin, for I'm in a hurry to cheer you up.
If you were more cooperative, however, you would view and then let me know your take on "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." After all, I've given you MY take on "Red Dawn."
megapotamus| 9.20.09 @ 5:32AM
"An intellectual is someone who speaks with general authority on topics in which he has no specific competence." Irving Kristol
Ken (Old Texican)| 9.20.09 @ 9:50AM
Spectator
Thank you for that nice article. Truly a gentle man.
Also, Spectator, thank you for giving us a venue for an exchange of ideas.
I have read some brilliant thought in your ongoing cornucopia of articles, but also from many of your commenters here. I have literally a book sized document of copy/pastes from them so I won't let remarkable thoughts slip through my fingers.
As I am sure you have noted, T.E.A.M. AMERICA
is a result of some of your brightest commenters getting in touch "off site". The neatest aspect of that is that those particular folks have a penchant for ACTION rather than mere observation.
You also have of course the requisite sprinkling of puffers, crushing bores, and condescending idiots, but that must be expected with the wide net you have spread. Heh!
We on the Team have been in contact with a number of State Republican party "headquarterses'" worker bees and have identified a lot of "conservative" young candidates with a lot of promise.
We have also connected a lot of tea party groups and given them some direct action ideas they seem to like.
Mr. Tyrell, I hope you will drop in to our blog site.
and peek at Our "inaugural" article, and also click the "about" button and get a glimpse of our mission statement. http://judgeroy.wordpress.com
Highest regards from all of us
Alan Brooks| 9.21.09 @ 12:21AM
He has other things to do than drop in to your blog. People are busy thinking about their own lives.
Commenters are just flies at the barbeque.
S.L. Toddard| 9.21.09 @ 11:20AM
The story of Irv Kristol and neoconservatism is nothing less than the story of how the Right transformed itself from the anti-authoritarian, anti-statist Right of the first half of the 20th century to the hyper-statist Authority-fetishizers of today:
…In any case, the lasting legacy of Irving Kristol is that he was instrumental in turning the conservative movement away from its radical anti-statism and toward an almost exclusive concentration on the moral imperative of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. His followers and epigones, who carry on the work in his wake, are the warmongers at the Weekly Standard and the Limbaugh-Hannity know-nothing Right, which sees every recognition of the limitations of American power – government power – as a "betrayal." This is surely a most unconservative – even anti-conservative – vision, a form of radicalism that resembles nothing so much as Trotskyism-turned-inside-out.
One of the big differences between Stalin and Trotsky was the former’s conception of "socialism in one country" – the idea that communism could survive only in the Soviet Union and its satellites, without inciting a world revolution. Trotsky, sticking to the orthodox Marxist-Leninist position, held that a world revolution was imperative, or else the Soviet Union was doomed to fail, encircled as it was by the hostile, capitalist West.
What the neocons did was simply switch allegiances from the old Soviet Union to the United States, taking their hotheaded Trotskyist temperament with them – and finally aspiring to lead a world revolution with the United States government at its head. When George W. Bush announced the launching of what he called a "global democratic revolution," he was merely echoing the neo-Trotskyist rhetoric of his closest advisers and the intellectual movement from which they sprang.
The prospects of that revolution grow dimmer by the day, but the idea lives on, as does neoconservatism. In the age of Obama, it takes on new forms – as I explained in my last column – but the essence remains the same: war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see. That, in brief, is the program of the neoconservatives, and Kristol’s legacy for the ages.
http://original.antiwar.com/ju.....istol-rip/
Modern Republican proponents of unlimited state power and World Democratic Revolution truly believe these things to be "conservative", and are entirely oblivious to the radical leftist pedigree of such notions.
Ken (Old Texican| 9.21.09 @ 11:51AM
Alan
Probably you might want to begin thinking about your larger family. ie: our country.
(see puffer above). heh!
Gerrymander| 9.23.09 @ 2:22AM
Do you really think this is relevant at all? Is it still 1969? Not one dumbshit who reads this blog has ever heard of the sds.
ps, no. no, its not relevant. Let the pigfucker rot in hell with novak.
Alan Brooks| 9.23.09 @ 2:24AM
I like cock.
rent a car| 12.17.09 @ 3:41PM
Great article.
inchirieri masini | inchirieri masini