Mortimer Adler

“ In the whole realm of social thought there can, therefore, be nothing but opinion. Since there is nothing but opinion, everybody is entitled to his own opinion. . . . If everything is a matter of opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion. And, of course, if success is the test of rightness, right is on the side of the heavier battalions. But President Hutchins will not succeed in changing education at Chicago for the same reason that it will not be changed in most of our institutions. ”

“ Even if the First World War had never happened, even if there had been no postwar generation to spread its disillusionment, even if such phrases as "making the world safe for democracy" had not come to symbolize how men can mistake empty slogans for sacred shibboleths, the present generation would be as full of sophistry and skepticism. For the past forty years there have been forces at work in American education which had to culminate in this result. ”

“ Last June, while the commencement orators were calling for renewed faith in democracy, a student at Williams College wrote a guest editorial in the college paper which bluntly said fascism is a better object of faith than democracy. It has more to offer, positively and constructively. Democracy is decadent and dying. It does nothing but repeat old shibboleths, out of step with the times. Fascism does things, and does them in terms of contemporary realities. ”

“ Not rooted in reason, such attachments are impermanent. They can be easily uprooted by those who are skilled in playing Pied Piper to the passions. That is why I dread the instability of a generation which, at best, will only have "faith" in democracy—but no sure reasons for upholding it as objectively the best form of political community. If their "faith" in democracy amounts to nothing more than well-disposed feelings at the moment, change of circumstances may alter the direction of their sentiments and they may find themselves with a faith in fascism or the same thing by another name. ”

“ Such skepticism leads naturally to realpolitik: in the game of power politics—and there is no other—only force and propaganda count. The issue between fascism and democracy can not be argued as if there were a right and wrong to it. Whoever wins is right; whatever works is good. Our college students today, like Thrasymachus of old, regard justice as nothing but the will of the stronger; but unlike the ancient sophist, they cannot make the point as clearly or defend it as well.
What, then, is the difference between our youth and Hitler's? ”

“ Strangely enough, it is much easier to solicit preparedness for war than preparedness for peace. Men can be energized into action, even radical reforms, when the issues are urgent enough, and the ends not much beyond their noses. The long term objectives are seldom achieved by the purposeful planning of man or the concerted action of nations. They are reached, slowly and painfully, through the inscrutable windings of history. Education will not shake off its typical modern faults until history is ready for the end of modern times and the birth of a new cultural epoch. ”

“ There is no question that the spectacle of democracy malpracticed may have killed some youthful enthusiasm for its cause, no question that the go-getting materialism of the American environment has corrupted youth more than novelists ever could, no question that the young have felt themselves betrayed by their elders. ”

“ The very things which constituted the cultural departure that we call modern times have eventuated, not only in the perverted education of American youth today, but also in the crises they are unprepared to face. That fascism should have reached its stride in Europe at the same time that pseudo-liberalism—the kind Lewis Mumford denounces as corrupt, pragmatic liberalism—has demoralized us, is a historic accident. ”

“ What has been happening in American education since 1900, what has finally achieved its full effect in the present generation, flows with tragic inevitability from the seeds of modern culture as they have developed in the past three hundred years. ”

“ But it is not the failure of democracy to solve its economic problems, nor the shallowness and stupidity of its political leadership which has caused the disaffection.
The real trouble is that our college students and recent graduates do not take any moral issues seriously, whether about their personal affairs or the economic and political problems of the nation. Their only principle is that there are no moral principles at all, their only slogan that all statements of policy, all appeals to standards, are nothing but slogans, and hence frauds and deceptions. ”

“ In any of the possibilities I can foresee, our greatest need is the clearest understanding of what democracy means, the most patient rational articulation of its principles. And I do not mean that this should be a rare secret, possessed by the favored few who have written books on the subject. I mean it should belong to the masses whom democracy educates—certainly all those who enjoy the opportunities of college education. ”

“ When men no longer have confidence that right decisions in moral and political matters can be rationally arrived at, when they no longer regard themselves as rational animals, but as rationalizing brutes, the institutions of democracy are the walls of an empty house which will collapse under pressure from without because of the vacuum within. ”

“ We must believe that man can discover truth, goodness, and right by the exercise of his reason, and that he may do so even as to those problems which, in the nature of the case, science can never solve. . . . Political organization must be tested by conformity to ideals. Its basis is moral. Its end is the good for man. Only democracy has this basis. If we do not believe in this basis or this end, we do not believe in democracy. These are the principles which we must defend if we are to defend democracy. ”

“ While it is not unanimously accepted, the doctrine of scientism is certainly the dominant dogma of American philosophy today. The degenerative tendency of modern philosophy to move in this direction reached its culmination in American pragmatism and all its sequelae—the numerous varieties of positivism. All the varieties agree on one point: that only science gives us valid knowledge of reality. Hence philosophy, at its best, can be nothing more than a sort of commentary on the findings of science ”

“ I do not know whether MacLeish had the parallel in mind, but he was repeating Plato's charge that the poets, the storytellers, the tellers of half-truths, were the corrupters of youth. I have never thought that Plato was right about the poets. His characterization of them was right, but not his judgment of their influence. They are storytellers; they are men of imagination rather than of thought; they certainly cannot be relied upon to give youth sound moral and political instruction ”

“ Can anything be done about American education? I doubt it. The college presidents who expressed such deep concern about American youth last June do not, for the most part, see educational failure itself as the major cause of their condition. If they remember their commencement addresses they may open college with a renewed effort to inspire "faith in democracy," to appeal for a purely emotional loyalty to the nation in time of stress. As the emergency increases there may be talk of military training and similar expedients for immediate preparedness. ”

“ They react at once against these, or any other authors, who write as if truth could be reached in moral matters, as if the mind could be convinced by reasoning from principles, as if there were self-evident precepts about good and bad. They tell us, emphatically and almost unanimously, that "there is no right and wrong," that "moral values are private opinions," that "everything is relative." ”

“ Just as scientism is a misuse of science, in itself good, so semanticism names the excessive exploitation of semantics, which in itself is a good discipline concerned with the criteria for determining the significance of words.
An American college student who, under the elective system, samples courses in the natural and social sciences, in history, philosophy, and the humanities gradually accumulates the following notions: (1) that the only valid knowledge of the nature of the world and man is obtained by the methods of experimentation or empirical research ”

“ He will accept without question the complete divorce of economics from ethics and, in discipleship to Machiavelli, he will become as much a realist in politics as Hitler and Mussolini. If, in addition to being bright, he is proud of his modernity, he will regard anyone who talks about standards of goodness, principles of justice, moral virtues as an unregenerate old fogy ”

“ What is impressive is the uniformity of our experience during the past ten years in teaching high school students, college students of all classes, graduate students drawn from various divisions of the university. We have found the same thing in trying to teach the philosophy of law to future lawyers and the philosophy of education to future teachers. ”

“ Men of good will are not just sweet-tempered animals, but beings whose desires aim at a good they rationally apprehend as such. When the mind refuses to see the good and the bad of things, repudiating any moral quality in things and actions to see, the will is blind, and blindly attaches itself to this or that through natural instinct, waywardness, or caprice. ”

“ The Second World War finds us with a prewar generation. It consists of the youngsters still in college and the graduates of the past ten years. Considering their state of mind, one is tempted to say that the fathers have tasted war and the children's teeth are set on edge. Archibald MacLeish has in fact suggested that the temper of the postwar generation communicated itself and formed the temperament of the youth today. ”

“ College presidents will not try to fight the enemy in their midst—the destructive doctrines which dominate American education today—because they do not recognize this enemy, or worse, they belong in his camp. President Conant, for example, has been one of the most vocal exponents of intervention. He urges us to fight for democracy. But he has never affirmed—and being a scientist, is not likely to see the need for—an independent metaphysics, without which ethics and politics have no rational foundation. ”

“ A bright college student will readily draw certain inferences from these few basic notions that get dinned into him from every source of his education. He will see for himself that moral questions, questions of good and bad, right and wrong, cannot be answered by the methods of natural or social science. ”

“ It is in the philosophy course that the student really learns how to argue like a sophist against all "values" as subjective and relative. Far from being the last bulwark against the scientism professed or insinuated by every other part of the curriculum, the philosophy courses reinforce the negativism of this doctrine by inspiring disrespect for any philosophy which claims to be independent knowledge. And, to complete the job, the ancient sophistries which our philosophy departments have revived are implemented by semanticism. ”

“ Unlike Hitler's youth, however, they mean by success their own personal advancement, not nationalistic aggrandizement. Hitler's young men, through a mystical identification of personal with national success, work for Germany. Our young men work for themselves, and they will continue to suffer democracy—which, remember, they do not think can be proved to be intrinsically better than fascism—only so long as it works for them. True, at the present moment, they feel that Hitler is a bad man and say they don't like totalitarianism ”

“ It is the misuse of science, intellectually as well as practically, which is to blame. We do not blame science for the murderous tools it has enabled men to make; neither should we blame science, or for that matter scientists, for the destructive doctrines men have made in its name, men who are for the most part philosophers and educators, not scientists. ”

“ Sherwood, who felt that youth considered "democracy a decadent mess—and no wonder, in view of the environment in which they grew up: the jazz age of the early 20s, the hypocrisy and crime of prohibition, the drunken sailorism of the Coolidge boom, and the wailing defeatism of depression." Another author placed the blame on young men's doubts about their economic or spiritual stake in American democracy. And still another said that they had "lost faith in democracy. It is up to democracy to show it is worth fighting for." ”

“ For the sake of clarifying a point in Aristotle's Politics on the statesman's use of education, Mr. Hutchins took the position that education cannot improve the community, that education will never serve the cause of social progress. He argued that the aims of education are always determined by existing moral and political standards, and hence one cannot hope for educational change to raise the general morale. ”

“ Such principles as we have are not different enough from those of Hitler to make us very rugged in defending ours in preference to his. And second, we are not united and clear about such principles as we have. We are losing our moral principles. But the vestiges of them remain to bother us and to interfere with a thoroughgoing commitment to amoral principles. Hence we are like confused, divided, ineffective Hitlers." The payoff is indicated: "In a contest between Hitler and people who are wondering why they shouldn't be Hitlers, the finished product is bound to win." ”