The Tyranny of Equality

Part 3: The Four Horsemen of the Philosophical Apocalypse

Now, let’s return to we to where we left off before we took the sidebar into the Natural vs. Positive Law.  If you can remember, I demonstrated that there has been a dramatic growth in laws, rules, and regulations as evidenced by the Federal Register.  I also demonstrated that dramatic, almost exponential, growth occurred during the early to mid sixties and continued through the seventies. Since laws, rules, and regulation inevitably limit personal Liberty then this rapid expansion of laws must have been for the Common Good as that is the only justification for attenuating Liberty.  I speculated that such a rapid expansion of the Common Good into the sphere of Personal Liberty might be due to a change in the national consciousness and conscience that lead to a reordering of priorities with respect to Liberty and the Common Good.

Perhaps we should consider what was happening during this time. Those of you who lived this time, as I did, know that it was a tumultuous era.  Here’s a list of some of the people, events, and ideas of that time between the early to mid-sixties to the end of the seventies (not necessarily listed in chronological order):

• Civil Rights Movement
• Cold War, Kennedy vs. Khrushchev, Cuban Missile Crisis
• Second Vatican Council
• Explosion of growth in college attendance
• The beginning decline in Church attendance
• John F. Kennedy’s assassination
• The Space Program, the Triumph of Science, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
• Vietnam War/Anti-War Movement
• Civil unrest in cities and college campuses
• Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy
• Hippies, counter cultural activism
• The Generation Gap, Cultural disruption, “Don’t trust anybody over 30.”
• Margaret Mead and Cultural Relativism
• Birth Control, Women’s Movement, Reproductive “rights”
• Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll, “If it feels good, do it.”
• Vietnam War ends, Saigon falls
• Watergate, Nixon resigns
• Carter, hyperinflation, gas lines, Iranian Hostage Crisis, “Crisis in Confidence”

Wow, that’s a lot to cram into 15 to 20 years!  I am certainly not going to discuss each of the items listed above.  I do believe that we can distill out essential features that influenced the Zeitgeist of this era.  Just in case you are not familiar with the word “Zeitgeist” it is generally translated as the “spirit of the age.”  Zeitgeist “is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time” (from Wikipedia).  There are a couple of understandings of Zeitgeist, how it originates and how it influences the culture.  The one that I prefer understands Zeitgeist as emerging almost imperceptibly from the myriad of interacting influences on a culture, which in turn, accelerates the evolution of that culture by influencing the continued development of that culture consistent with that Zeitgeist.  So what was the Zeitgeist of this particular era in question?  I believe it can be characterized by the following:

• disruption
• distrust of authority
• militancy
• search for new paradigms and identities

The phrase “Generation Gap” was developed in the sixties.  It represented the widening gulf between the generation of the sixties with the previous generation (often been referred to as the Greatest Generation).  This gap prevented the passing on of the previous generations values which were seen as suspect and the cause of much of the crises that were facing the culture of the West and particularly that of America.   The disruption between the generations as well as the historical events that occurred during this time led to distrust not only in the institutions of this culture, but in the cultural assumptions upon which they were based.  This distrust frequently broke out into acts of militancy whose aim was to overthrow the existing paradigms.  However, culture, like nature, cannot live in a vacuum so the sixties and seventies generation was marked by paradigmal experimentation ranging from "Turn on, tune in, drop out," Hare Krishna, Marxism, and, to quote the King of Siam, “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” 

Jimmy Carter summed it up pretty well at the end of this era in a speech he gave in 1979.  The speech became known as the Malaise speech, but he never used that term and is more appropriately referred to as the “Crisis in Confidence” speech.  Here are a few selected quotes from the speech.

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy….The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.  The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.  These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of the Zeitgeist of this era.  Here’s a link to the speech if you’d like to read it in its entirety.

 (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/). 

The speech didn’t help Carter very much given the fact that many people saw it as a “downer” (to use the vernacular of the time).  Nevertheless, the Crisis in Confidence of which he spoke of had been brewing by this time for nearly a generation.

There were multiple paradigms that were explored as a result of this Crisis in Confidence. There are, however, some general characteristic that emerged that are not only ubiquitous now throughout our culture, but have largely supplanted the previous assumptions that have driven Western Culture.  These assumptions have become nearly axiomatic in our culture and function like default settings in an operating system; the user generally isn’t even aware of them.  That is until you question the validity of these assumptions.  Let me give you an example:

When I taught public high school I mostly taught biology and chemistry, but I also had the opportunity to teach philosophy.  On the first day of class I would ask, “How many of you think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder?”  100% of the class agreed with that statement (okay, one didn’t but he was just oppositionally defiant).  Then I would respond, “No, you are wrong.  Beauty is an objective reality, just like this pen here (I’d display my dreaded red pen).  The fact that you think it’s a blue pen doesn’t change the fact that it’s a red pen and if you don’t think that the Borodin String Quartet is beautiful that doesn’t make it any less so.”  Usually there was stunned silence as their brains began to short circuit.  The vast majority of the kids simply didn’t know how to process what I had just said.  It was like Robbie the Robot in the movie Forbidden Planet when ordered to do something that his programing forbade him to do (a great movie of this era).   At this point I’d ease them in to it and explain that this was Plato’s idea about beauty, and that we’d be discussing it in the near future and that if they were to get anything out of this discussion they had to avoid dismissing his ideas altogether and understand the arguments on there own merit.  They were free to accept or reject it based, I hoped, on reason and experience.  One time, a student came up to me after class.  He had been in my chemistry class the year before so I knew him quite well.  “You can’t be talking like that Mr. McMahon,” he said when the rest of the students had left; I could see he was genuinely concern.  “You might get in trouble.”  Wow, I thought, this kid really gets it.  He understood the subversiveness of objective Beauty. And his concern turned out to be prescient on more than one occasion, but that’s another story.

In the example I spoke of above, I demonstrated one of the default axioms in the new paradigm of the West—Relativism (also known as Subjectivism).  There are many kinds of relativisms, there is ontological relativism (such as with Beauty), cultural relativism, moral relativism, and many more and growing daily.  Relativism didn’t emerge on its own, rather it grew out of the soil of Skepticism.  Skepticism is the belief that the “truth” doesn’t exist or if it does we, as humans, cannot access it or know it with certainty.  This is in direct opposition to both the School of Athens and the Synogue/Church of Jerusalem, the cradles of the West.  In a single generation the West had lost its “faith” in the very epistemology responsible for its creation.  The Zeitgeist of disruption, and distrust had traded the assumption of “self-evident” knowledge for nearly complete faith in skepticism.  But not even the most ardent believers in the new paradigm can live a life of total skepticism and relativism.  They had to turn to something to give them a sure and unequivocal ground upon which to keep their house of cards from collapsing.  They found their answer in Science. 

One of the few things the American could be proud of during the sixties and seventies (other than the progress in civil and women’s rights) was Science and, in particular, the Space Program.  Science and Technology had proven its self whereas other institutions had not.  But science began to evolve in the late 20th century.  There was a time when many scientists would have thought it was presumptuous to assume that only the Scientific Method was able to acquire certain knowledge, and that knowledge itself was synonymous with Science.  This notion is known as Scientism and with it has come a tendency to explain all human phenomena (ethic, religion, etc.) in terms of Science which was becoming increasingly Materialistic in its assumptions.  This growing confidence in Science is evinced by the increasing number of students getting PhD’s in Science from less than 1000 in the early 80’s to over 35,000 in 2012 .  Concomitant with the growing confidence in Science and distrust in traditional institutions has been a “crisis in confidence” in religious institutions.  Gallop reported in a 2012 an overall decline in people’s confidence in their churches:

Two major findings apparent in Gallup's confidence in the church and organized religion trend are, first, the long-term decline in Americans' confidence in this societal institution since 1973, and second, the suppressed confidence among Catholics relative to Protestants starting in 1981, and becoming more pronounced by 2002.
(http://www.gallup.com/poll/155690/confidence-organized-religion-low-point.aspx)

In many ways Scientism has replaced religion as an authoritative voice in the areas of the “Big Questions.”  Some (including myself) may question whether or not Scientism is up to the task of explaining the totality of the human condition, but many in science have been quick to take advantage of the void left by retreating religious and other philosophical system.  The authority of Scientism is now bordering on authoritarianism as evidenced by the interesting graph below:

Sounds like the verbiage used by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages doesn’t it?  You don’t think so?--just ask those who dare to question the orthodoxies of some of science’s pivotal theories.  Doubters need not apply.

There is another axial default setting that was reset during the Zeitgeist of the sixties through seventies that has continued to flourish to this day—anti-intellectualism.  This manifests itself in several ways.  It is often used to justified one’s behavior in ethically challenging situations. Although one can appeal to Skepticism, Relativism, and Scientism usually when one is justifying actions or position it is easier to revert to emotionalism (one form of anti-intellectualism) which manifest itself in such phrases as:

• “Well, this is just how I feel about it.” This claim is supposed to supercede any reasoned objections by virtue of its claim to personal feelings

• “You’re not a woman, minority, LGBT, (fill-in-the-blank) so you can’t relate to my situation and you therefore have no say in the matter.”  So we have nothing to share in our common humanity that permits me to enter into conversation?

• “I wouldn’t do it myself, but its not my place to tell other people what to do.”  Clearly, the relativist must make this claim because to do otherwise would be to suggest that there are possibly universal norms of behavior.  

There are other forms in which anti-intellectualism manifest: people either don’t know how to think, don’t care to think, or too lazy to think, so it is much easier to rely on the “talking points” of those they rely to do their thinking for them.  It is an acquiescence of one's personal responsibility to know your thoughts, be able to justify them, and even change your mind when there are inconsistencies within a paradigm.

Anti-Intellectualism is also used as the “enforcer” of the new paradigm.  It employs a laundry list of ad hominem attacks aimed at intimidating anyone who might dare to question the new assumptions or the deduced ideology they spawn.  Accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, denierism (as in global warming denier) can set the opponent on their heals without having to bother to use a single reasoned arguments.  And if there isn’t an –ism, —phobia, or an –denier suitable for the occasion, just call them a hater.  And don’t forget to put it on social media; you’ll be pretty much guaranteed that they’ll be doing public penance for thinking an unorthodox thought.  Welcome to the new Inquisition.

I am proposing that Skepticism, Relativism, Scientism, and Anti-Intellectual became the new default axial settings in the West, in part, because of the Zeitgeist of disruption, distrust in authority, militancy, and the search for new paradigms which created an openness to the adoption of these new axioms.  What is remarkable is how quickly these ideas spread throughout the culture as if there was a concerted effort to inculcate the ideas into a disillusioned youth who were seeking a new paradigm.  This may seem a bit conspiratorial, however, prior to this time there were warnings of an upheaval in Western ideology.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, Dean of Yale Law School and president and chancellor of the University of Chicago recognized early that the education system was being skewed in favor of ideas that were inconsistent with Western values.  He famously said:

“A system that denies the existence of values denies the possibility of education.  Relativism, scientism, skepticism, and anti-intellectualism, the four horsemen of the philosophical apocalypse, have produced that chaos in education that will end in the disintegration of the West.”

I am suggesting that this infiltration in higher education with ideas antithetical to Western values was responsible for the rapid spread of these ideas into the culture.  But this could only occur if enough young people were exposed to these ideas during the time in which  this openness to new axioms of thinking was also present.  The graph below shows the growth of students enrolled in colleges from the 1869 to 2009. 

In the past fifty years more citizens have received a higher education than at anytime in history.  I believe that the new axioms that are prevalent in the West today are the result of the conjunction of the Zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, with a change in the values of education, along with the surge in students entering higher education.  A new set of values have begun to emerge as a result of the forces discussed here. This new American (or European) has elements of the Protagorean Man who, being the “measure of all things” may not be judged because there are no external or transcendent standards. The New American is enlightened by skepticism, relativism, and scientism.  He is likely an “evolved” liberal who has finally divested himself of his atrophied Judeo-Christian values and virtues. Freed from the vestigial remnants of a "darker and more intolerant age" he has adopted a more utilitarian and “goal-oriented” approach.  He is a Progressive and Science and Technology has imbued him with the confidence that continued human progress is not only possible, but that its ultimate aim, utopia, is within society’s reach.  Those that do not hold to this view, the Judeo-Christians who believe that man is “fallen” and in need of divine law and redemption are the problem; they are the Luddites who throw their Medieval ideas into the machinery of the Progressive State sabotaging human progress.

The Progressive American doesn’t think nationally; he thinks globally and sees himself as part of a global movement dedicated to progressing human evolution towards the perfection of civil society.  To guide this societal evolution the Progressive places his trust and confidence in the elite of human society--highly educated and specialized experts who employ the power of the necessarily expansive state to direct and, if necessary, coerce the masses toward this end. The carrot that seduces the majority of citizens to relinquish their liberty to the elitist controlled state is the promise of equality. But this is an equality quite different from that of the Athens-Jerusalem Tradition and of our Founding. The stick that keeps the stragglers within the herd are the laws, rules, and regulations that punish the outliers and the political correctness that threatens them with ostracization.

Next: Equality Redefined