Knowledge And Decisions

These are of course not attacks on intellectual freedom; merely on some of the most precious concerns of ordinary human beings down through the ages. Just how far the myopic view of freedom can go may be illustrated by the behavior of musicians under Nazi rule. As various ethnic, political, and cultural groups successively fled Nazi persecution, the musicians — including, notably, conductor Kurt Furtwangler and composer Richard Strauss — remained behind to collaborate with the Hitler regime, because there were no comparable restrictions on musicians’ freedom.²⁸⁵ Against this background, it may be less surprising that intellectuals living in affluent suburbs (or in “security buildings” in the cities) and/or with their children in private schools, can see no reason for working class people’s resentment of “progressive” political developments other than benighted ignorance, blind reaction, or vicious racism. Evidence that these are not, in fact, the attitudes of most working people is ignored, for these are the only explanations consonant with the intellectual vision. That businessmen — large or small — are in effect conscripted to be part-time, unpaid administrators for the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and numerous other federal agencies will occasion even less concern.

Past erosions of freedom are less critical than current trends which have implications for the future of freedom. Some of these trends amount to little less than the quiet, piecemeal, repeal of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was very different from the French Revolution of the same era. The French Revolution was based on abstract speculation on the nature of man by intellectuals, and on the potentiality of government as a means of human improvement. The American Revolution was based on historical experience of man as he is and has been, and on the shortcomings and dangers of government as actually observed. Experience — personal and historical — was the last court of appeal of the founders of the United States and the writers of the Constitution. Their constantly reiterated references were to “experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions,”²⁸⁶ to “the accumulated experience of ages,”²⁸⁷ to “the uniform course of human events,”²⁸⁸ to the history of ancient Rome,²⁸⁹ to “the popular governments of antiquity,”²⁹⁰ and the history, economics, and geography of contemporary European nations.²⁹¹ They explicitly rejected “Utopian speculations,”²⁹² “the fallacy and extravagance” of “idle theories” with their “deceitful dream of a golden age.”²⁹³ In contrast to Robespierre, who said that revolutionary bloodshed would end “when all people will have become equally devoted to their country and its laws,”²⁹⁴ The Federalist regarded the idea of individual actions “unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good” to be an eventuality “more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.”²⁹⁵ They were establishing a government for such flesh-and-blood people as they knew about, not such creatures as they might hope to create by their activities.

The opposing policies of the two revolutions — and their very different historical fates — were related to their very different premises about the nature of knowledge and the nature of man. To the men who made the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution, knowledge derived from experience — personal and historical — and not from speculation or rhetorical virtuosity. Their own backgrounds before the Revolution were as men of affairs, personally responsible for economic outcomes, whether commercial or agricultural. By contrast, the French philosophes were denizens of literary salons where style, wit, and rhetoric were crucial²⁹⁶ — and whose whole lives were lived under circumstances in which the only authentication process consisted of impressing readers or listeners. In the modern vernacular, they “never met a payroll” — or a scoreboard, or a laboratory experiment, or a military campaign, or any other authentication process whose empirical results could not be talked away. They were masters of the world of unverified plausibilities.