Book Corner
A New Theory On the Undoing of American Liberalism

culture

 

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution
How the Assassination of John F. Kenney Shattered American Liberalism

By James Piereson
Encounter Books, 253 pages, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

          James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute where he directs the Center for the American University. He is also president of the William E. Simon Foundation. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, Piereson has not bequeathed us just another take on the Kennedy assassination.  In fact, this unprecedented historical essay is not that at all. His analysis of what we today know about Lee Harvey Oswald, the Zappruder film, the private life of the Kennedys, the Warren Commission report—while fascinating and fresh—is hardly central to the substance of Piereson’s penetrating and innovative analysis.  This book, rather, is about the unraveling of American liberalism—the great political movement that reached a high water mark with the election of JFK in 1960, riding on a wave of unprecedented successes ranging from the New Deal to the rebuilding of post-war economies in Germany and Japan. 

 

          With convincing argumentation, Piereson lays out his original theory that, central to the untimely demise of American liberalism is the assassination of JFK—and not the assassination as such, but the political left’s subsequent interpretation of history as occasioned by that assassination.

 

“Liberalism,” writes Piereson—referring to its stature in the early 1960’s, “had earned the designation as the public philosophy of the nation.”  Liberalism was confident in itself and America.  By the end of the decade, however, that great political movement collapsed. Piereson argues that key to this transformation of liberalism into a deeply divided movement which flirted with irrationalism and revolution, embittered against America, was its incapability of coming to terms with the assassination of JFK. By creating the myth of a martyred Kennedy who died for the sins of a nation unworthy of him, rather than accepting him as a moderate Democrat who was killed by a communist agitator, the left lost its confidence in America and destroyed liberalism in the process.  

 

          The novum accomplished by Piereson is to locate—with a very readable prose and convincing argumentation—the Kennedy assassination in this historical perspective, particularly as the cathartic event which irreversibly compromised the fate of the liberal movement in the United States. Among its many merits (especially for readers not deeply familiar with this period of American history) Piereson’s essay places in articulate contrast the liberalism that flourished prior to the assassination and the liberalism that emerged from the ashes of that tragic event.

 

          Piereson authoritatively explores how the conspiracy theories which almost immediately emerged from the tangled circumstances of the assassination, were simply so many attempts to make sense out of what was, in essence, a senseless killing.  Almost overnight, Kennedy is remarkably and unfoundedly, engraved in the American mind as the victim of all that ailed the nation, even as a martyr—on a parallel with Abraham Lincoln—for the civil rights movement.  Of course, as Pierson unapologetically points out again and again, the facts of Kennedy’s life, let alone the assassination, do not corroborate such images. Nonetheless, “it was this interpretation,” writes Piereson, “that would lay claim (irrationally) to the liberal mind in the years after the assassination.”

 

          But no conspiracy theory or journalistic interpretation of events could surpass the re-writing of history occasioned by Jackie Kennedy’s construal of the assassination the whole Kennedy-New Frontier phenomenon with the myth of Camelot, and the subsequent cultural identification of Kennedy as a modern King Arthur figure. Unbeknownst to Jackie Kennedy at the time, argues Piereson, this was to have a cataclysmic effect on the liberal movement:

 

To the extent that after 1963 the liberal movement reshaped itself in terms of this image, it absorbed in great degree the sentimental liberalism of Jacqueline Kennedy. By this route, the excessively idealistic version of liberalism that earned the rebuke of all the leading postwar liberals in the 1950s, including Kennedy himself on many occasions and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Vital Center, moved into the mainstream of liberal thought in the 1960s and thereafter.  But by turning John F. Kennedy into a liberal idealist, Mrs. Kennedy inadvertently contributed to the unwinding of the tradition of American liberalism that her husband represented in life… The Camelot myth was contrived to magnify the sense of loss felt as a consequence of Kennedy’s death and the dashing of liberal hopes and possibilities. If one accepted the image (and many did), then the best times were now in the past and would not soon be recovered.

 

As Pierson observes, such an interpretation of the events constituted a sharp departure from the liberal ideal of history as a progressive enterprise on a continuum toward an ever-more perfect instantiation of the great American experiment. By fostering nostalgia for the past, the Camelot image presented the Kennedy assassination as the tragic and blunt end of that noble project, reinforcing the national sentiment of dashed hopes.  The consequence of such an upheaval, as Pierson writes, was one of the great historical paradoxes of recent times, namely, “that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president’s coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that drove Oswald to assassinate him.”

 

          As Pierson ultimately points out, “the legacy of the liberal movement of the 1950’s however was picked up somewhat later by a loose collection of intellectuals called ‘neo-conservatives.’” I suspect Piereson would also agree with the following observation penned by the late Richard John Neuhaus, critiquing an earlier article on this topic by Pierson appearing in a 2006 issue of Commentary:

 

There are, of course, changes in public policy specifics, and the divide over abortion created by the Supreme Court has skewed political alignments in surprising ways, but the angry, conspiracy-obsessed Left of today is wrong in thinking that it is contending against the Right. As in the 1960s, so also now, it is raging against liberalism. To put it somewhat differently, the neoconservatism of today is the liberalism of 1960.

 

Camelot and the Cultural Revolution is supported by ample notes and a complete bibliography. For readers born—like me—in the 1960’s, this essay is a must-read for an in-depth interpretation of a chapter in American history which shaped our own childhood and informed our earliest notions of political “left” and “right”.  I also recommend a superb video interview with Piereson conducted by Peter Robinson for the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” series.

 

 

 

 

 
Remembering the Phenomenon of Life

Hans JonasThe Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology

By Hans Jonas

Northwestern University Press,
303 pages, 2001


The most pervasive and destructive intellectual error in the modern world, the one largely responsible for the current moral and theoretical disintegration of our understanding of what it is to be a human being, is reductionism, a vice of the mind which has often been erroneously identified with the scientific attitude. I am not speaking of the rational practice of attempting to understand the constituent elements of which natural organisms are composed. Nor am I referring to the commitment not to multiply explanatory causes needlessly.

These are simply basic principles of sound reasoning canonized since the writings of Aristotle. Rather, I am speaking of the methodological commitment to accept only external, quantifiable data as scientific evidence for what a thing is, and thus the insistence on accounting for natural, living things entirely in terms of their material parts and processes. Thus, integrally related to the reductionist mindset is the acceptance of materialism as the fundamental explanation of the nature of reality.

If these two ideologies are indeed artificially parasitic upon authentic scientific endeavor and yet constitute the chief source of our fragmented view of man, then understanding both their arbitrariness and inadequacy for sound scientific inquiry ought to be one of the primary goals of contemporary intellectual endeavor. Few introductions to this task could be more profitable than Hans Jonas’ classic work of natural philosophy, The Phenomenon of Life. This penetrating book is one of the few successful attempts in 20th century philosophy to recover what can only be termed an Aristotelian understanding of nature and organism as constituted by a unifying essential form and inwardly directed toward certain nature ends.

In eleven distinct, but conceptually related essays, Jonas critically delves into the philosophical assumptions and blind spots of modern scientific reductionism, traces its emergence from the incoherent wreckage of Cartesian dualism, shows its logical collapse into existential nihilism, and, most importantly, points out the path to its overcoming through the recovery of a more sound, honest, and experientially open understanding of what it means for an organism to be alive and have vital operations.

This latter claim may sound pedestrian and redundant, but the startling fact of modern “scientific biology,” Jonas rightly notes, is that despite its claim to be the ‘study of life’, contemporary biology in fact “submerges the distinction of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’.” In other words, it does not and, due to its adopted methodological commitments, cannot recognize a real and qualitative distinction between living and non-living natural bodies. Modern biological practice, confining itself as it does “to the physical, outward facts…ignore[s] the dimension of inwardness that belongs to life.”

The consequence is a study of living organisms as nothing more than highly complex physical mechanisms constituted only by their distinct material parts and the motive properties of those parts. Once this view is adopted, it follows inevitably that scientific “explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless,” with no room being allowed for the experience of sentience, consciousness, freedom, agency, and most of all, inherent, natural purpose.

One of Jonas’ principal points throughout these essays is that this self-imposed limitation on what is allowed to count as an observational experience of nature is entirely artificial and indeed unreasonably distorting. There was no “new finding” or discovered “fact” that rationally necessitated the modern scientific repudiation of substantial form and self-directed teleology. The triumph of mechanistic materialism was not so much a victory of sober observation over metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, but of uncomprehending hostility over an honest acceptance of the fundamental and inescapable interior human experiences of agency and finality. Jonas writes:

Regarding final causes, we must observe that their rejection is a methodological principle guiding inquiry rather than a statement of ascertained fact issuing from inquiry. There is not first a record of persistent failure to detect them in nature…The mere search for them was quite suddenly, with the inauguration of modern science, held to be at variance with the scientific attitude, deflecting the searcher from the quest for true causes. It is only then, in the exercise of that attitude, that the negative record is accumulated, viz., by the success of doing without final causes…[I]t has never been argued that final cause is a far-fetched or abstruse or even ‘unnatural’ concept – on the contrary, nothing is more cognate to the human mind and more familiar to the basic experience of man: and this was precisely what in the new scientific attitude counted against it.”

Jonas is one of the few philosophers in the twentieth century to see so clearly that the scientific emperor is rather scantily clad when it comes to the rational justification of this prejudice. What we are dealing with here is a pre-scientific dogma, and an incoherent one at that, for the scientist holding such views cannot conduct his research without relying upon such experiences in the very practice of scientific investigation. His own experienced operations of enduring agency, free deliberation, rational observation, inference, and deduction are presupposed by, and inextricable from, the scientific process.

And yet, on a reductionist view of organisms, these operations must be explained away as accidental “epiphenomena” [i.e. accidental surface appearances] of countless unthinking, naturally determined bodies behaving according to necessary properties which act without thought or reference to truth, consciousness, or understanding. The latter logically dissolve into residual folk terms of an outdated psychology that did not recognize the “human organism” as, in reality, nothing more than a dizzyingly complex collection of basic material entities behaving according to unthinking and necessarily determined laws. Annihilated in the process is a thinking, conscious subject (i.e. the scientist) who endures through time and is capable of both theoretical argument and the discovery of truth. Jonas observes:

Nothing could be more devastating for this account of theory-forming than to be found self-illustrative.’…In abstracto the behaviorist [another term for our reductionist] must count himself among the objects of his method. But in concreto he must make the implicit reservation of self-exemption, at least with regard to his reasoning in support of the behavioristic thesis, for the sake of its claim to validity.

This “self-exemption” results in what Jonas calls “split personality theorizing,” the widespread indulgent habit of not applying one’s general conclusions about nature and man to the significance of one’s own thoughts and actions. The moment logical consistency is afforded its due place, however, the reductive materialist position can be seen to destroy the very possibility of reasoning and truth, including its own. Jonas explains:

The present argument [i.e. that of accounting for the rational operations of human consciousness as nothing but passive products of more basic material entities]…is by this view the epiphenomenon of physical occurrences determined by necessities of sequence entirely foreign to “meaning” and “truth.”…[T]here is no way on the part of those engaged in the argument, marionettes as they are to those necessities, to evaluate the issue on its merits, and thereby to decide between two alternatives.”

The consequence is the self-refutation of the reductive materialist position, for assuming it is “true,” it follows that there are no true arguments. The mechanistic biologist cannot possibly claim that he is holding his view because the evidence has persuaded him of its veracity. On his view of the world, there are no causes at work in nature that have a care for the truth or that do not work according to blind necessity. Whatever “his” “consciousness” is, it is not something that has the power to deliberate between hypotheses but is rather passively molded according to the material necessities which are its real moving causes.

And yet we know that that we do make valid arguments, freely deliberate between opposite conclusions, and differentiate between the true and the false. These interior experiences of our cognitive operations are immediately evident to us and, more importantly, are more known to us than any speculative claim about the ultimate constituents of nature. Jonas simply makes the valid inference that if reductive materialism cannot account for these experiences or advances claims which deny them, then there must be a richer and more expansive view of nature and the human organism. It is just this that Jonas calls us to pursue by becoming more attentive to the full range of our human experience, interior as well as exterior:

The evidence we find in ourselves is an integral part of the evidence concerning life which experience puts at our disposal. That it must be used critically to avoid the pitfalls of anthropomorphism goes without saying. But used it must be – and as a matter of fact, most of the time it is, however much biologists and behaviorists may assure us and themselves of the contrary.

Accordingly, “The nondogmatic thinker will not suppress the testimony of life; he will accept it today as a call to a revision of the conventional model of reality” hitherto dominant in modernity. What precisely constitutes this testimony we have only briefly indicated. In the pages of The Phenomenon of Life much more is said about its content and structure, but even Jonas is aware that he is only pointing toward the re-inauguration of an authentic philosophy of nature. The complete success of that project will require both a full recovery of the Aristotelian understanding of the principles of nature as well as the reflective deepening of the sources, significance, and range of those principles. One would be hard pressed to find a more profitable first step toward the accomplishment of both of these goals than to pick up and ponder this philosophical gem of a book.

 

 

Since 1999, Chris Oleson has been an associate professor of philosophy for the Legion of Christ at their Center for Higher Studies in Thornwood, New York. He teaches the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of culture, as well as various courses in moral and political philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School. He lives with his wife, Rachel, in Brewster, NY. They have 5 children.