PARTISAN REVIEW
397
Is it possible to spend one's life charting behavior patterns with
no desire to
test
the patterns in experiments of behavior control? I
don't know, but there is occasionally in these volumes a note of
im–
patience with the weakness and inefficiency of established authorities
in their responses to student activism. "Where authority abdicates,"
Shils writes, "through failure, ineptitude, and weakened self-confi–
dence, it invites aggression against itself." Liberal governments "re–
spect the freedom of expression; they legislate for the extension of
welfare benefits and educational opportunity and submit to the
insults and abuse directed toward them." How great is the distance be–
tween these superficially innocuous remarks and Brzezinski's criticism
(in
The New Republic
for 1 June 1968) of the authorities for com–
mitting the "errors" of "procrastination," of "seeking refuge in legal–
istic responses" instead of "striking immediately and effectively" when
"faced with a revolutionary situation"? When in doubt about your
values, hit. Kristol's rationalization for his proposal that the gov–
ernment "step in and fill the power vacuum" in the universities is
that "the citizens of this republic have a claim to assert that higher
education is 'their' province, too. . . ." Such intervention would be
"a huge injection of pluralism" into the educational system. But even
if we grant that the
society
is pluralistic, the government most cer–
tainly is not. And the identification of the established authorities with
"the citizens of this republic" (again, an interesting heightening of
tone) is an extraordinary presumption. The government
is
the people,
the Party
is
the people: how many times have we heard totalitarian
governments make such
claims?
Repression for the sake of "freedom"
and in the name of the "people." The seductiveness of that lie can
be measured by the appeal
it
continues to exert even over some of
those who pride themselves on having dramatically denounced it.
And the illusion of being able to speak nonideologically creates an
atmosphere of marvelous calm in which the government can be ser–
viced with maximum efficiency. Parsons is right: the norms must
be conserved at all costs, for they are the inheritance of that aberrant
form of liberal humanism which soothes consciences and insures con–
formity by magically detaching "cognitive values" from that immer–
sion in politics which is life.
Robert Paul Wolff also insists on "the primacy of the value
of
truth,"
but he is much less vague than
his
primary commitment
