The Closing of the American Mind

So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery si coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one.
Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, forthey dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students whoare interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to theirold cultures, of course. This si not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.
Openness used to be the virtue that permittedus to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power.
Cultural relativism destroysboth one's own and the good. 
When I was a young teacher at Cornell, I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. He knocked them down like tenpins. I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an ideaofwhat the opposite of a prejudice might be. He reminded me of the little boy who gravely informed me when I was four that there si no Santa Claus, who wanted me to bathe in the brilliant light of truth. Did this professor knowwhat those preju- dices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered howto give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought? My informant about Santa Claus was just showing off, proving his superiority to me. He had not created the Santa Claus that had tobe there in order to be refuted. Think of al we learn about the world from men's belief in Santa Clauses, and al that we learn about the soul from those who believe in them. By contrast, merely methodological excision from the soul of theimagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall o fthe cave does n o tpromote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers.
It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imaginingany orderof taste, anyway of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family's members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded from within the household itself.
This gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes in the souls of the young accounts for the differencebetween the students I knew at the beginning of myteaching career and those I face now. The loss of the books has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that thereare alternatives toi t .They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. The very models of admira- tion and contempt have vanished. Flatter, because without interpreta- tions of things, without the poetry or the imagination'sactivity, theirsouls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around. The refinement of the mind's eye that permits it to see the delicate distinctions among men, among their deeds and their motives, and constitutes real taste, is impossi ble without the assistance of literature in the grand style.
As filmshave emancipated themselves from the tyranny under which they suffered and which gave them abad conscience, the ones with serious pretensions have become intolerably ignorant and manipulative. The distance from the contemporary and its high serious- ness that students most need in order not to indulge their petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves cannot be found in the cinema, which now only knows the present. Thus, the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Liberation from theheroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current "role models." They are constantly thinking of themselves in terms of fixed standards that they did not make. Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Mosesor Romulus, they unconsciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young peoplewithout admirations they can respect or avow, who are artificially restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue.
We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image ofaperfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.
The sexual revolution must overthrow all theforces ofdomination, the enemiesof natureand happiness. From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or half-conscious childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictless, universal society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness-"We Are the World," a pubescent version of Ale Menschen werden Brüder, the fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. 
And in whatdoes progress culminate? Apubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.
Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois, to have undangerous experiments with the unlimited. He is willing to pay dearly for them. The Left is better interpreted by Nietzsche than by Marx. The critical theory of late capitalism is at once late capitalism's subtlest and crudest expression. Anti-bourgeois ire is theopi- ate of the Last Man.
Starvation ni Ethiopia, mass murder in Cambodia, as wel as nuclear war, are all real calamities worthy of attention.But they are not immediate, not organically connected to students' lives. The affairs of daily life rarely involve concern for a larger community in such a way as to make the public and private merge in one's thought. It isnot merely that one si free to participate or not to participate, that there si no need to do so, but that everything militates against one's doing so. Tocqueville describes the tip of the iceberg of advanced egalitarianism when he discusses the difficulty that a man without family lands, or a family tradition for whose continuation he si responsible, wil have ni avoiding individualism and seeing himself as an integral part of a past and a future, rather than as an anonymous atom in a merely changing continuum. 
When a child goes away to college, it is really the beginning of the end of his vital connection with his family, though he scarcely realizes it at the time.
Socrates provides birth control, abortion and day-carecenters, as wel as marriages that last a day or a night and have as their only end the production of sound new citizens to replenish the city's stock, cared for by the city. He even adds infanticide to the list of conveniences available. A woman will probably have to spend no more time and effort on children's business than a man would in curing a case of the measles. Only then can women be thought to be naturally fit to do the same things as men. Socrates' radicalism extends to the relation of parent and child. The citizens are not to know their own children, for, if they were to lovethem above others, then the means that brought them into being, the intercourse of this man and this woman, would be judged to be of specialsignificance. Then we would be back to the privatefamily and the kinds of relatedness peculiar to it.
The fact that there is today a more affirmative disposition toward childbearing does not imply that there is any natural impulse or compulsion to establish anything like a traditional fatherhood to complement motherhood. 
The return to motherhood as a feminist ideal is only possiblebecause feminism has triumphed over the family as it was once known, and women's freedom will not be limited by it.  
Academically, students are comfortably unisexual; they revert to dual sexuality only for the sex act. Sex no longer hasany political agenda in universities except among homosexuals, who are not yet quite satisfied with their situation. 
And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literaturefor them, because there do not seem to them to be permanent problems for them. As I have suggested earlier, this is the first fully historical or historicized generation, not only ni theory but also ni prac- tice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastestsympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. 
The tension between freedom and attachment, and attemptsto achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. But in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature.
Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. But as they have succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberatedand with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them. 
So far, so good. The children are reconciled to the family. But the problem, it seems to me, is in the motive of the parents to care for their children. The children can say to their parents: "You are strong,and we are weak. Use your strength to help us. You are rich, and we are poor. Spend your money on us. You are wise, and we are ignorant. Teach us." But why should mother and father want to do so much, involving so much sacrifice without any reward? Perhaps parental care is a duty, or family life has great joys. But neither of these is a conclusive reason when rights and individual autonomy hold sway. The children have unconditional need for and receive unquestionable benefits from the parents; the same cannot be asserted about parents.
People can continue to live while related to the dead beloved; they cannot continue to be related to a living beloved whonolonger loves or wishes to be loved. This continual shifting of the sands in our desert separation from places, persons, be liefs produces the psychic state of nature where reserve and timidity are the prevailing dispositions. We are social solitaries.
The feminist response that justice requires equal sharing of al do mestic responsibility by men and women is not a solution, but only a compromise, an attenuation of men's dedication to their careers and of women's to family, with arguably an enrichment in diversity of both parties but just as arguably a fragmentation of their lives. 
Are both parents going to care more about their careers than about the children?Previously children at leasthad the unqualifieddedication of oneperson, the woman, for whom their care was the most important thing ni life. Is half the attention of two the same as the whole attention of one? Is this not a formula for neglecting children? Under such arrangements the family si not a unity, and marriage si an unattractive struggle that is easy to get out of, especially for men.
In family questions, inasmuch as men were understood to be so strongly motivated by property, an older wisdom tried to attach concern for the family to that motive: the man was allowed and encouraged to regard his family as his property, so he would care for the former as he would instinctively care for the latter. This was effective, although it obviously had disadvantages from the point of view of justice. When wives and children come to the husband and father and say, "We are not your property; we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such," the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. But the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they aregiving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father's flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father wil almost inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be. 
The cure now prescribed for male irresponsibility is to make them more irresponsible. 
They want relationships, but the situation is so unclear. They anticipate a huge investment of emotional energy that si just as likely as not to end in bankruptcy, to a sacrifice of their career goals without anyclarity about what reward theywill reap, other than a vague togetherness. Meanwhile, one of the strongest, oldest motivesfor marriage is no longer operative. Men can now easily enjoy the sex that previously could only be had in marriage. It is strange that the tiredest and stupidest bromide mothers and fathers preached to their daughters-"He won't respect you or marry you if you give him what he wants too easily"-turns out to be the truest and most probing analysis of the current situation. Women can say they do not care, that they want men to have theright motives or none at all, but everyone, and they best of all, knows that they are being, at most, only half truthful with themselves.
Sated with easy, clinical and sterile satisfactions of body andsoul, the students arriving at the university today hardly walk on the enchanted ground they once did. They pass by the ruins without imagining what was once there. Spiritually detumescent, they do not seek wholeness in the university.These most productive years of learning, the time when Al cibiades was growing his first beard, are wasted because of artificial preco- ciousness and a sophistic wisdom acquired in high school. The real moment for sexual education goes by, and hardly anybody has an idea of what it would be.
Modern democracy was, of course, the target of Nietzsche's criti- cism. Its rationalism and its egalitarianism are the contrary of creativity. Its daily life is for himthe civilized reanimalization of man.Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look intotheabyss.
The war against the Right had been won domestically at the polls, and in foreign affairs on the battlefield. The decisive question of principle had been resolved. Equality and the welfare state were now a part of the order of things, and what remained was to complete the democratic project. Psy- chotherapy would make individuals happy, as sociology would improve societies.
Al awareness of foreignness disappears. It is thought to be folk culture, all-American, part of the American century, just as "stay loose" (asopposed to uptight) is supposed to have been an insight of rock music and not a translation of Heidegger's Gelassenheit. The historical sense and the distance on our times, the only advantages of Weimar nostalgia, are gone, and American self-satisfaction-the sense that the scene is ours, that we have nothing important to learn about life from the past--is served.
The soul becomes a stage for a repertory companythat changes plays regularly sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy; one day love, another day politics, and finally religion; now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loy- alty; the city or the country; individualism or community; sentimentality or brutality. And there is neither principle nor will to imposea rank order on al of these. Al ages and places, al races and al cultures can play on this stage. Nietzsche believed that the wild costume ball of the passions was both the disadvantage and the advantage of late modernity. The evident disadvantage is the decomposition of unity or "personality," which in the long run will lead to psychic entropy. The advantage hoped for is that the richness and tension present in themodern soul might be the basis for comprehensive new worldviews that would take seriously what had previously been consigned to a spiritual ashcan. This richness, according to Nietzsche, consisted largely in thousands of years of inher- ited and now unsatisfied religious longing. But this possible advantage does not exist for young Americans, because their poor education has impoverished their longings, and they are hardly aware of thegreat pasts that Nietzsche was thinking of and had within himself. What they do have now si an unordered tangle of rather ordinary passions, running through their consciousnesses like a monochrome kaleidoscope. They are egotists, not in a vicious way, not in the way of those who know the good, just or noble, and selfishly reject them, but because the ego si al there is in present theory, in what they are taught.
We may now have run out of the new revolutions, and the new metaphysics required to justify them, which were intended to rectify the French Revolution's perceived failures; but the reconciliation with reality si more fatigued than enthusiastic. I use the word "perceived" because, on the basis of the variety of readings of the French Revolution--by monarchists, Catholics, liberals, socialists, Robespierreans, Bonapartists- whichwere not idle academic exercises but life-forming and action-engen- dering, Nietzsche concludedthat there was no text here but only interpre- tation. This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, thatthe perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be.
The American Revolution produced a clear and unified historical reality; the French Revolution, a series of questions and problems. Americans have tended to look at theFrench Revolution with indulgence. It represented the good things,akin to ours, but did not succeed in providing a stable institutional framework for them. A large segment of intellectual opinion on the Continent, the most influential segment, regarded the French Revolution as a failure not because it was not successful in establishing a liberal democracy but because it had been entirely too successful in producing the liberal democratic type of man-ie., the bourgeois--and giving his class, the bourgeoisie, power in society. Even so pro-American and proliberal awriter as Tocqueville, who understood the French difficulty to be indeed its incapacity to adapt toliberal institutions,was melancholy about the prospects for a fully human life within them.
But another view of these events dominated public discussion on the Continent.To some Europeans, the Americans represented an intolerable narrowing of thehuman horizon, and the price paid for their decent order and prosperity was too high. The French aristocracy had a nobility, brilliance and taste that contrasted sharply with the pettiness and grayness of liberal society's commercial life and motives.
And freedom for us meant merely acting as one pleases, restricted only by the minimum demands of social existence. 
Prudence points not toward regimes dedicated to the cultivation of rare and difficult, if not impossible, virtues, but toward a good police force to protect men from one another and allow them to preserve themselves as wel as possible. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau al found that one way or another nature led men to war, and that civil society's purpose was not to cooperate with a natural tendency in man toward perfection but to make peace where nature's imperfection causes war.
Through unaided reason, man as man, asopposed to the man of this place or time, nation or religion, can know the causes of things, can know nature for himself. Autonomy does not mean, as is now generally thought, the fateful, groundless decision in the void, but governing oneself according to the real. There must be an outside for the inside to have meaning.
To say, "I've got my rights," si as instinctive with Americans as breathing, so clear and evident is this way of looking at things. It signifies the rules ofthe game, within which men play peacefully, the necessity of which they see and accept, and the infringement ofwhich arousesmoral indignation. It is our only principle of justice. From our knowledge of our rights flows our acceptance of the duties to the community that protects them. Righteousness means for us respect for equal rights equally guaran- teed by the force of government. Everyone in the world today speaks of rights, even the communists, the heirs of Marx, whoridiculed "bourgeois rights" as a sham and in whose thought there is no place for rights. But almost every thoughtful observer knows that it is in the United States that the idea of rights has penetrated most deeply into the bloodstream of its citizens and accounts for their unusual lack of servility. Without it we would have nothing, only chaotic selfishness; and ti si the interested source of a certain disinterestedness. We feel people's interests should be respected. This scheme represented a radical break with the old ways of looking at the political problem. In the past it was thought that man is a dual being, one part of him concerned with the common good, the other with private interests.
Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this si the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
Respecting the rights of others so that theirs will be respected; obeying the law because they made it in their own interest. From the point of view of God or heroes, all this is not very inspiring. But for the poor, the weak, the oppressed-theoverwhelming majority of mankind t-i is the promise of salvation. As Leo Strauss put it, the moderns "built on low but solid ground."
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not knowwhat he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he wil never be eitherman or citizen. He will be goodneither forhimselfnor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He wil be nothing.
It was Locke who wanted to preserve t h eprimacy of the sentiments of nature ni the civil order, and the result of his mistake is the bourgeois. Rousseau invented the term ni its modern sense, and with it we find ourselves at the great source of modern intellectual life. The comprehen- siveness and subtlety of his analysis of the phenomenon left nothing new to be said about it, and the Right and the Left forever after accepted his description of modern man as simply true, while the Center was mipressed, intimidated, and put on the defensive by it. So persuasive was Rousseau that he destroyed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment at the moment of its triumph.
There is either an uneasy acquiescence to the present or the attempt in one way or another to return to the past, or thesearch for acreative synthesis of the two poles, nature and society.
The search for solutions, easy or difficult, to problems is the stamp of modernity, while antiquity treated the fundamental tensions as permanent. The first reaction to the self's maladaptation to society, its recalcitrance to the rationality of preservation and property, si the attempt to recover the self's pristine state, to live according to its first inclinations, to "get in touch with one's feelings," to live naturally, simply, without society's artificially generated desires, dependencies, hypocrisies. 
This ist h edirect result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke's is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense ofright. Rousseau's lies behind the most prevalentviews of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such adjustmenti svery difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature.The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crisp, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist si the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst si the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a modus vivendi. Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it.
The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinc- tions between good and bad, ni one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for himself. Now the good man si the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. This si most obvious ni the political realm. For Aristotle, good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, while bad ones have rulers who use their positions to further their private interest. For Locke and Montesquieu there is no such distinction. A good regime has the proper institutional structures for satisfying while containing the selfish men who make it up, while a bad one does not succeed in doing this. Selfishness is presupposed.
The difference is made apparent by comparing the image of Socrates talking to two young men about the best regime, with the image of Rousseau, lying on his back on a raft floating on a gently undulating lake, sensing his existence.
He contains in himself the elements of the legislator and the prophet, and has a deeper grasp of the true character of things than the contemplatives, philosophers, and scientists, who take the given order as permanent and fail to understand man.
Scientists do not prove that there are no miracles, they assume it; without this assumption there is no science. It si easy today to deny God's creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man's creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God's, exercises a strange attraction. In honoring it, the scientists' opinions are not the results of science or of any serious reflection on science. They are merely conforming to democratic public opinion, which has, unawares, been captured by Romantic notions adapted to flatter ti (every man a creator). The artist, not the scientist, has become the admired human type; and science senses that it must assimilate itself to that type in order to retain its respectability intact. When every man was understood to be essentially a reasoner, the scientist could be understood to be a perfection of what all men wanted tobe. That was Enlightenment's way of establishing the centrality of science and making it admired. This change in self-description shows how the Zeit- geist has altered and how science, instead of standing outside of ti and liberating men from it, has been incorporated into it.The theoretical life has lost its status. Now the scientist scrambles to recover his position as the perfection of what all men want to be; but what all men want to be has changed, undermining the natural harmony between science and society.
The language has been trivialized. Words that were meant to describe and encourage Beethoven and Goethe are now applied to every schoolchild. 
There is in American society a mad rush to distinguish oneself, and, as soon as something has been accepted as distinguishing, to package it in such a way that everyone can feel included. 
The idea of culture was established in an attempt to find the dignity of man within thecontext of modern science. 
Nietzsche examines the patient,observes that the treatment was not successful, and pronounces God dead. Nowthere cannot be religion; but inasmuch as man needs culture, the religious impulse remains. No religion but religiosity. This suffuses Nietzsche's analysis of modernity, and, unno- ticed, it underlies the contemporary categories of psychology and sociol- ogy. He brought the religious question back to the center of philosophy. The critical standpoint from which to view modern culture is its essential atheism; and that more repulsivesuccessor of the bourgeois, the last man, is the product of egalitarian, rationalist, socialist atheism.
To put ti simply, Nietzsche says that modern man si losing, or has lost, the capacity to value, and therewith his humanity. Self-satisfaction, the desire to be adjusted, the comfortable solution to his problems, the whole program of the welfare state,are thesigns of the incapacity to look uptoward theheavenof man's possible perfection orself-overcoming. But the surest sign si the way we use the word "value," and in this Nietzsche not only diagnosed the disease but exacerbated it. He intendedto point out to men the danger they are in, the awesome task they face of protect- ing and enhancing their humanity. As he understood it, men in our current decrepitude could take it easy if they believed God, nature or history provides values. Such belief was salutaryas long as the objectified creations of man were still noble and vital. But in the present exhaustion of the old values, men must be brought to the abyss, terrified by their danger and nauseated by what could become of them, in order to make them aware of their responsibility for their fate. They must turn within themselves and reconstitute the conditions of their creativity in order to generate values. The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instrumentsof last manhood--the skilledbow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict. Chaos, the war of opposites, is, as we know from the Bible, the condition of creativity, which must be mastered by the creator.The self must also bring forth arrows out of its longing. Bow and arrow, both belonging to man, can shoot a star into the heavens to guide man. Stripping away the illusions about values was required, so Nietzsche thought, by our situation, to disenchant all misleading hopes of comfort or consolation, thereby to fill the few creators withaweand theawareness that everything depends on them. Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history. In it man faces his true situation. It can break him, reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide. But it can hearten him to a reconstruction of a world of meaning. Nietzsche's works are a glorious exhibition of the soul of a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative. They constitute the profoundest statement about creativity, by a man who had a burning need to understand it.
Authentic values are those by which alife can belived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Moses, Jesus, Homer, Buddha: these are the creators, the men who formed horizons, the founders of Jewish, Christian, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese culture. It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacityto generate culture. 
This issomehow impossible, and Nietzsche struggled with the prob- lem throughout his career, perhaps without a satisfactory resolution. But he knew that the scientific view is deadly to culture, and that the political or moral cultural relativist of the ordinary sort is doomed to have no culture. Cultural relativism, as opposed to relativism simply, teaches the need to believe while undermining belief.
In his greatest creation, M. Homais, the pharmacist, Flaubert encapsulated everything that modernity was and si to be. Homais represents the spirit of science, progress, liberalism, anticlericalism. He lives carefully with an eye to health. His education contains the best that has been thought and said. He knows everything that ever happened. He knows that Christianity helped to free the slaves, but that it has outlived its historicalusefulness. History existed ot produce him, the man without prejudices. He si at home with everything, and nothing si beyond his grasp. He si a journalist, disseminating knowledge for the enlightenment of the masses. Compas- sion si his moral theme. Andal this si nothing but petty amour-propre. Society exists togive him honor and self-esteem. Culture is his. There are no proper heroes to depict nor audiences to inspire. They are all one way or another in business. 
The artist is the most interesting of al phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man. His unconscious si ful of monstersand dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as "world," and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable. We do what we do out of a fatethat isour individuality, but we have to explain and communicate. This latter is the function of consciousness; and when it has been provided with a rich store by the unconscious, its activity is fruitful, and the illusion of its sufficiency is even salutary. But when it has chopped up and chewed over its inheritance, as mathematical physics has now done, there are not enough nourishing plants left whole. Consciousness now requires replenishment.
Trotsky's and Mao's correction of Marx in calling for "permanent revolution" takes account of this thirst for the act of revolution, and its appeal lies therein. The radical students of the sixties calledthemselves "the movement," unaware that this was also the language used byyoung Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung. Movement takes the place of progress, which has a definite direction, a good direction, and is it force that controls men. 
One could foreseea time, at least in the developed countries, when everybody wouldbe a bourgeois. So another prop was knocked out from under Marxism. The issue is not really rich and poor but vulgarity. Marxists were coming perilously close to the notion that egalitarian man as such is bourgeois,and that they must join him or become culture snobs. Only an absolutely unsubstantiated dogma that thebourgeois worker is just an illness of our economic system and a product of false consciousness keeps them from saying, as did Tocqueville, that this is thenatureof democracy andthat you mustaccept it or rebel against it. 
A language developed to explain to knowers how bad we arehas been adopted by us to declare to the world how interesting we are. Somehow the goods got damaged in transit. Marcuse began in Germany in the twenties by being something of a serious Hegel scholar. He ended up here writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy sex interest in One Dimensional Man and other well-known books. In the Soviet Union, instead of the philosopher-king they got the ideologist tyrant; in the United States the culture critic became the voice of Woodstock.
Accepting the consequences for affirming what really counts is what gives Antigone her nobility; unwillingness to do so is what makes her sister Ismene less admirable. Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilt only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it. In this optic Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are not ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems and the significance of choice, but victims whose sufferings are no longer necessary in our enlightened age of heightened consciousness. America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices.
But a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life or expected to be answered there. It provided an atmo- sphere of free inquiry, and therefore excluded what is not conducive to or is inimical to such inquiry. It made a distinction between what is important and not important. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition b u tbecause tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level. It contained marvels and made possible friend- ships consisting in shared experiences of those marvels. Most of all there was the presence of some authentically great thinkers who gave living proof of the existence of the theoretical life and whose motives could not easily be reduced to any of the baser ones people delight in thinking universal.
The majority is all there is. What the majority decides is the only tribunal. It is not so much its power that intimidates but its semblance of justice. Tocqueville found that Ameri- cans talked very much about individual right but that there was a real monotony of thought and that vigorous independence of mind was rare.
Democratic conscience and the simple need to survive combine to suppress doubt.The kinds of questions that Tocqueville put to America-the answers to which allowed him to affirm the justice of equality more reasonably and more positively than most of us can do-came out of an experience that we cannot have: his direct experience of an alternative regime and temper of soul-aristoc- racy. If we cannot in any way have access to something like that experi- ence, our understanding of the range of human possibilities is impoverished, and our capacity to assess our strengths and weaknesses is diminished.
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legalconstraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside. 
When there si poverty, disease and war, who can claim the right to idle in Epicurean gardens, asking questions that have already been answered and keeping a distance where commitment is demanded? The for-its-own-sake is alien to the modern democratic spirit, particularly in matters intellectual. Whenever there is a crunch, democratic men devoted to thought have a crisis of conscience, have to find a way to interpret their endeavors by the standard of utility, or otherwise tend to abandon or deform them. This tendency is enhanced by the fact that in egalitarian society practically nobody has a really grand opinion of himself, or has been nurtured in a sense of special right and a proud contempt for the merely necessary.
The most important function of the university in an age of reason si to protect reason from itself, by being the model of true openness.
It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Des- cartes, and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and a sense of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democ- racy. They are not dogmatisms but precisely the opposite: what is neces- sary to fightdogmatism. The university must resist t h etemptation to try to do everything for society. The university si only one interest among many and must always keep its eye on that interest for fear of compromis ing it in the desire to be more useful, more relevant, more popular.
The very special status of whatcame to be called academic freedom has gradually beeneroded, and there hardly remains an awareness of what ti means. There is barely a difference recognized in popular and even university consciousness between academic freedom and job securityguaranteed by government, business orunions. It has become assimilated to the economic system and looks like self-interest of a kind that is some times approved of and sometimes disapproved of. The rights of science are now not distinguishable from therights of thought ni general, of any description whatsoever. Freedom of speech has given way to freedom of expression, in which the obscene gesture enjoys the same protected status as demonstrative discourse. It si al very wonderful; everything has become free, and no invidious distinctions need to be made. But it is too good to betrue. All that has really happened is that reason has been knocked off its perch, is less influential and more vulnerable as it joins the crowd of less worthy claims to the attention and support of civil society. The semitheoretical attacks of Right and Left on the university and its know|edge, the increased demands made on it by society, the enormou sexpansion of higher education, have combined to obscure what si most important about the university.
His defense cannot be characterized as "intellectually honest and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wantsto be left alone as much as possible, but si fuly aware that a man who doubts what everygoodcitizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comesinto conflict with the city. 
What the Republic actually teaches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one's own mind, but finding a way to have one's own mind.
The strategy adopted for the assault on the oldregime had two parts o n e belonging to natural science and the other to political science.
The scientists inthis system belong to aworld order ofscientists, for national loyalties and customs are irrelevant to them as scientists. They are cosmopolitan. Gradually the political orders would have to be transformed, sothat no particularity remains in theway of reason's operations or produces conflict between the scientist's loyalty to country and his loyalty to truth. There is only one science. It i sthe same everywhere and produces the sameresults everywhere. Similarly, there can, in principle, be only one legitimate political order, founded by, on, and for science. There may well remain individual nations with old but decaying traditions stemming from special experiences in the past, andattachment to them may tug at the scientists' cosmopolitanism. But the nations must al gradually become similar. They must respect the rights of man.
They were trying to make the central human good central to society, and Enlightenment was and remains the only plausible scheme for doing so.
Science, is freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science.
The scientists want to liveastheyplease delightingninumbers,figures,andstars andareno longer obliged tohide their desires. The people still have means of making themselves felt, but they are essentially enslaved to what scientists provide for them. The scientists can cut of the sun's light to the world below.
Instead of being real partners in the business of overthrowing the antiscientific regimes of the past, the scientists became fellow travelers. Once theological supervision was defeated andeveryone accepted the need for scientists instead of priests, science was free and, in principle, indifferent to the political regimes that need and use them. Early Enlightenment thinkers appear to have believed that there was a perfect coincidence between rational consentof the governed and the freedom of science. But science could not rationalize all men, and turned out not to have to, inasmuch as it became able to force whatever rulers there are to support it and leave it alone. 
Freedom had been restricted in the most effective way—by the impoverishment of alternatives. Nothing that was not known to or ex- perienced bythose who constitute the enormous majority--which is ultimately the only authority in America had any reality. Catering to democracy's most dangerous and vulgar temptationswas the function of the famous "critical philosophy." 
The greatest of thoughts were in our political principles but were never embodied, hence not living, ni a class of men.Their homein America was the university, and the violation of that home was the crime of the sixties. 
The good wil, as described by Kant, si a humble notion, accessible to every child, but its fulfillment is the activity of a lifetime of performing the simple duties prescribed by it. This morality always requires sacrifice. It some. Times entails danger and confrontation, but they are not of its essence and occur incidentally. Such morality, in order to be itself, must be for itself and not for some result beyond it. It requires resistance to the charms of feeling good about it and acclaim for it. This was not the morality that came into vogue in the sixties, which was an altogether more histrionic version of moral conduct, the kind that characterizes heroes in extreme situations. 
Somehow it was never the everyday business of obeying the law that was interesting; more so was breaking it ni the name of the higher law. 
Conscience, a faculty thoroughly discredited in modern political and moral thought and particularly despised by Marx, made a great comeback, as the all-purpose ungrounded ground of moral determination, sufficient at its slightest rumbling to discredit al other obligations or loyalties.
But that haunting senti- ment was assuaged by the factthat this was the first revolution made for TV. They were real because they could see themselves on television. All the world had become a stage, and they were playing leads. The cure proposed for the bourgeois disease really was its most advanced symptom.
The talented young could hope, and sometimes act, without guilt, ot gain first place.Thishas been changed partially, but only partially, by Christianity. It asserted equality before God and condemned pride, but it left the inequalities of this world in place. 
Concern and compassion were thought to be the indefinable X that pervaded all the parts of the Arts and Sciences campus. But when that evanescent mist dissipated during the seventies, and the faculties found themselves face to face with ill-educated young people with no intellectual tastes--unaware that there even are such things, obsessed with getting on with their careers before having looked at life-and the universitiesoffered no counterpoise, no alternative goals, areaction set in.
The easiestand most administratively satisfying solution is to make use of what is already there in the autonomous departments and simply force the students to cover the fields, i.e., take one or more courses in each of the general divisions of the university: natural science, social scienceand the humanities. 
And, unlike the natural scientists, they are insecure enough about their achievement to feel threatened by the works of earlier thinkers, perhaps abit afraid that students wil be seduced and fal back into the bad old ways.