Viereck is one of those guys that I always forget how much fun he is (while still being exceptionally insightful) until I'm actually reading him. He's one of those authors that I just want to grab people randomly on the street and shake them while shouting "why aren't you reading Peter Viereck??!"
He reminds us (forcibly, when necessary) that there is real evil in the world, and that it is the duty of all civilized peoples to resist it will all our might. Not necessarily with force of arms, but with force of character. True resistance to totalitarian regimes and movements begins not with stockpiling arms, but with careful self-examination and an honest analysis of our own history and character.
Viereck likewise has broad appeal, he's an Old-Right conservative, who supports the New Deal, Social Security, and limitations on the market. He openly criticized William F. Buckley, Jr. for trading conservatism for laissez-faire capitalism, he decried McCarthy for his witch-hunts, and the liberals for their witch-hunt against witch-hunts. He also subordinates politics to art and culture, stresses the importance of great leadership, and refuses to worship at the American altar of the mob, prefering to encourage virtue rather than going with the popular tide.
Overall, Viereck offers good answers to important questions in an engaging way. The primary weakness of this work is that several of his comments are dated, having mostly been written in the early 1950s. Many of his examples are unknown today, and have to be looked up (thank you Wikipedia!), but his general ideas still hold.
Some great quotes:
-"Society is in a bad way when too many people reject every ancient value in ethics and politics and art because thereby they can show off better at cocktail parties. Civilization is an infinitely fragile bundle of accumulated habits and restraints. The necessary conservative function of any generation is not just to enjoy itself but to pass on this bundle in good condition to the next generation." (246)
-The liberal, radical, and neo-conservative call to arms: "Why can't you, too, be an emancipated, forward-looking, noconforming Liberal Individualist, just like everybody else?" (xxi)
-"(1) The plain duty of every citizen, including the most ivory-tower intellectual, is to fight the totalitarian evil... (3) The glory of twentieth-century liberal intellectuals is the vigor with which they took the only possible moral position towards the Nazi threat... (4) the shame of twentieth-century liberal intellectuals is their failure to expose and fight Stalinist totalitarianism with exactly the same vigor they showed against its brown-shirted version." (6)
-"The conservative, politically descended from Burke, distrusts human nature and believes (politically speaking) in Original Sin, which must be restrained by the ethical traffic lights of traditionalism. The leftist and the liberal, descended from Rousseau, unconsciously assume the natural goodness of man- the less restrained in power the better.... this is the split between those who trust the 'natural goodness' of man and primarily want to release it from outer restraints, and those who fear his natural caveman propensities and primarily want to check them with inner restraints." (9-10)
-"Americans -all except intellectual Americans- ought to become belligerently pro-intellectual for a change." (13)
-"Intellect serves and ennobles whenever it searches for more truth and more beauty, in an unpretentious, impractical, haloed kind of way." (15)
The musings of Gaylord Babbitt, Viereck's vehicle for mocking both liberalism and neoconservatism:
-"Oh, poor P.V., will you never learn to be a Man of the World? Why, the way you talk, folks might think you're some Middle Westerner- I mean, some fellow who has never eaten the legs of a single frog!" (20)
-(the liberal argument) "Our kind of civil liberties must assume that no Communists at all exist, no Red Army exists, no Red atom bomb exists. Never deign to mention such mirages in your editorials or conversation. Mention only the real danger: the Pentagon dictatorship right at home. Whatever spoils our argument, doesn't exist." (27)
-"Call any ordinary Republican a fascist, and you'll never hear me protest that you're using language loosely. But as soon as you call a fascist a fascist, I get my fighting dander up; that's smearing, that's guilt by association, just like calling a communist a communist." (28)
-"Nobody likes 'blind dates. Being born is a blind date." (38)
Back to Viereck's writing (not using the voice of Babbitt)
-(on the apathy of college students) "This is an appeal not for belligerency but for compassion. Not for hate of the oppressor, but for a lot more spontaneous sympathy and aid for the oppressed behind the iron curtain and for the refugees who flee to the West. The civilians on the campuses can do many times more than at present to mitigate suffering without becoming recruiting sergeants. In 1937, many a campus raised funds to send an ambulance to Loyalist Spain for the victims of fascism. Today, how many send ambulances to West Berlin or South Korea or Greece to aid the victims of communism? Or is that somehow a 'different' kind of war? If a five-year-old child is half-starved and is mangled by barbed wire when its parents flee with it across the iron curtain to liberty, does this make it a 'reactionary,' unworthy of financial relief or of dignity and sympathy, while a child fortunate enough to have been persecuted by a right-wing government is a 'progressive' child, worthy of relief rallies in Madison Square Garden?" (40)
-"Communism and nazism are alike in their main business: total and permanent war upon mankind and the murder of millions of innocents. Compared with this main business, political and economic programs and ideologies may seem secondary. Yet communism and nazism do differ deeply psychologically in how they go about this main business. The Nazis murdered melodramatically and sadistically... The communists murder in an unlurid, businesslike fashion... For a Nazi or fascist, killing is an art; for a communist, a utilitarian science. The Hell created by the former looks like a grand opera by Wagner. The Hell created by the latter looks like the prosaic imitation of a Ford asseemblyline... Both are forced to use force because their programs violate nature: trying to change into herd animals the descendants of individualistic simians. But a very special kind of herd animals: in either of its forms, let us define the totalitarian state as a flock of carnivorous sheep." (53)
-"Reality [in light of the massacres of the 20th century by fascism and communism:] has become too extreme for even the extremest adjectives of overstatement. Reality can no longer be expressed by an exhausted vocabulary of apocalyptic apoplexies... [We must laugh, but it must be:] the golden brand of laughter [which is:] the highest seriousness. It has nothing in common with the irresponsible pose of capering at the edge of the abyss. For that, there is too much suffering in the contemporary world; uneasy lies the clown that wears a head." (55)
-"Even after reading Swift, Burke, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, and Yeats, many Anglo-American progressives still cling to their Rousseauistic faith in the infinite perfectability of human nature. In their politics and in their literature... they can see happiness and unhappiness but are color-blind to tragedy. Or else, they define tragedy superficially: for the rich, "emotional maladjustment;" for the poor, the unavailability of bathtubs. No room for saints, no room for drunkards; both must be 'psychoanalyzed' until they 'adjust'." (56)
-"[Americans rely on:] a whining optimism. It faces television sets to avoid facing the abyss." (57)
-"Loose accusations result in witch-hunts. Loose exonerations.. result in America's 'liberal' version of McCarthyism: the witch-hunt against 'witch-hunts.' Both brands of irresponsibles are destroying the American sense of proportion on which civil liberties depend, until the bewildered public wonders: Which is witch? It is a case of the crackpot calling the kettle red." (58)
-"I protest when they [the rich:] don't even spend their dividends on courtesans, horses, and champagne, but merely on Worthwhile Investments, donations to Worthy Causes (tax deductible), and nonalcholic, ulcer-coddling celery juice." (60)
-"Thumbs down on all professors who'll have you know they are 'needed in Washington.'" (64)
-"[The deadliest change in American and European culture is:] the substitution of technique for art; the substitution of the just-as-good for the real thing. What once resulted from the painful and inspired craftsmanship of an experimental and audacious individual is now mass-produced in painless, safe, and uninspired capsules. Is this not true today of every field of intellectual and artistic endeavor?" (66)
-"Definition of a suburb: any congregation of would-be city slickers who are deadly afraid of seeming suburban." (66)
-"Modernist poetry is a snore and an allusion." (68)
-"[Said sarcastically:] The stick-in-the-mud Old Liberals -Mill, Zola, Lincoln- were warped by unscientific prejudices against the infliction of suffering, no matter who or where. New Liberals are too busy serving mankind in general to waste their emotions on teh suffering of mere individuals (except the mental suffering of slandered fellow-liberals). Today the Old Liberals would waste time worrying about the mass-executions of millions in... China. You never hear a word about that from the New Liberal. He is too busy denouncing that sinister fascist [anti-communist:] China lobby." (71)
-"There is no civilization but the Middle Sea, and Romanized Gaul is its prophet." (74)
-"Sergeant Economics (says Corporal Ancient Classics), you think you're pretty smark, but we've been watching you. Don't think we don't know you were only a bootblack in civilian life, back in the Middle Ages. And now, just because you've been the new Colonel's orderly since 1789, you- but come, let's make up and be friends; let's all meet in that nice dark little alley next to the precipice, and we'll give you a real surprise present to celebrate that fine promotion you won for building such a cheery fire with our books." (77)
-"[The industrial revolution will ultimately conquer:] everything in the material universe except that tiny catalyst, the heart of man. The ethical rightness or wrongness inside the human heart will still determine whether any given physical or economic advance is a blessing or a curse, just as it did when the first caveman invented the first ax in some prehistoric 'industrial revolution.'" (88)
-"The American chore does not mean forcing our values down the throats of the rest of the world. Nor does it mean giving up our own values for the sake of new ones. It means stressing deliberately those values that we and the rest of the West have in common and minimizing those on which we differ." (92)
-"What finallyl makes the governments of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin identical is that the verb 'hate' is the more prominent in the vocabulary of all three." (103)
-" 'The best way to fight Communism is to let those who are suffering under it, and those fallen intellectuals whose soul is alive, experience understanding and sympathy, love and help, from the free world- those qualities, in short, that are foreign to the system.' " (104)
-"Totalitarianism has had an innate attraction for an able minority of literary intellectuals as fara back as Plato. He in turn expelled his fellow poets from his totalitarian republic, thus anticipating the modern popular impulse to send 'all long-hair radicals back where they came from.' Bad tempers on all sides may abate if all sides remember that it is nothing new... that some intellectuals have an inherent soft spot for totalitarian revolution and that, therefore, all intellectuals are distrusted by their nonintellectual fellows." (110)
-"The seeking of an impossible heaven-on-earth leads to more hell-on-earth than the seeking of a possible second best... The revolutionary-totalitarian mind is always in a hurry to get perfection aborning right here and now, so that totalitarian Caesariasm is necessarily violent: a Caesarian operation on history... The impossibility of any very rapid social improvement leads to an ever more ruthless attempt to force it on human nature by terrorism. In consequence, the abstract theorists of the most perfect democracy again and again end up as the concrete apologists for the most imperfect dictatorship." (111)
-"The intellectual's neutral aloofness from his society can change imperceptibly into unconscious hostility. This happens almost automatically in a society that does not appreciate his ideas as much as its electric dishwashers... Their instinctive self-identification with Socrates may suggest a self-destructive masochism or may suggest its apparent opposite, an aggressive resentment against the square-shouldered, rosy-cheeked extroverts." (112)
-"The main obstacle to understanding that communists are communists ([and:] not good neighbors, not agrarian reformers) was the possession of education, intellect, or great wealth." (123)
-"We must live in two worlds at once. We must live in the practical world of the Soveit threat, or it will wipe us out physically. We must meanwhile keep some part of our minds in the idealistic permanent world, seeing the eternal moral aspect of every material triumph, or it will wipe us out culturally and spiritually." (133)
-"America's strength is not the brute militarism of Prussianism and Russianism. Ours is the stronger strength of gentleness and tolerance... let us answer the clenched fist of Stalinist fascism with the clean hands of liberty." (137)
-"[Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin:] All were terrorists who believed in bad means to bad ends; down with all of them!" (142)
-"No Soviet citizen is safe or dares talk back to his wildest accusers. Definition of Soviet reality: the McCarthyite's dream of paradise." (148)
-"Like philosophical anarchists, pacifists are the salt of the eart. The presence of anyone with such stubborn -I almost said belligerent- integrity is a moral asset to our society, which needs to encourage its statist-threatened individualism... But! let them be open-eyed about it; let them not plunge blindly into 'antiwar' without examining the credentials of their associates; let our good Quakers, in short, look before they quake." (157)
-"For the millions of slaves behind the Iron Curtain, 'peaceful' coexistence means not peace but a continuation of torture and murder. For them such coexistence between governnments is not a 'lesser evil' than war, but indistinguishable from war." (162)
-"In our semi-closed society... our free democracy and our precious civil liberties rest on the statement 'These truths we hold to be self-evident.' They do not rest on the statement 'these outworn medieval hypotheses we hold to be the operational tools of economics or of the libido.'" (191)
-"Totalitarianism is not the opposite of naturalistic relativism, as many liberals believe, but its consequence... Being relativists themselves, many liberals call Hitler an 'absolutist' in values because they do not care to admit he was produced by the same amoral scientific relativism that.. produced them." (195)
-"Still living on the past capital of the Western value code, the good liberals smuggle in the decent, democratic values, whose moral basis they undermine, by conveniently 'discovering' for them a new pragmatic basis. Unfortunately the communazis, more logical and less decent than the liberals, feel no need to make this convenient discover." (197)
-"If you have become convinced that freedom depends on the unbroken continuity of a communal ethical tradition, then you must give the vote also to your ancestors." (202)
-"What actually keeps a free society free? Society is kept free by the traffic lights of law, not by the revolutionary lawlessness of well-meaning radicals and hasty innovators." (202)
-"If we perish, it will be from pettiness, from some new retreat into isolationism, from unadventurous lack of vision, from failing to rise to the grandeur of our historic role." (213)
-"The concept of civil liberties is aristocratic. It bravely defies democratic majority rule." (220)
-"It is true that already today a television set can serve what its ads call 'your beautiful American way of life.' But only when chopped up into firewood and blazing merrily." (249)
-"The new conservatism... never admires the past passively in sterile escapism. It must daily and actively re-experience, as if for the first time, the aspirations of the past- and then fulfil them in the future." (249)
-"A genuine, organic, society-binding conservatism links individuals by shared passions, not by cash alone. It links them by lofty aspirations, ripened by common experiences, by a long history of shared grandeurs and miseries." (254)
-"Far from being Marxist or revolutionary or leftist or a monopoly of liberals, a compassionate and humane approach to economic suffering is the logical outgrowth of the oldest Christian, Jewish, and Hellenic ethics." (260)
-"Then overboard with such dogmas as class war. (What is a class in America anyway? Have you ever seen one in the flesh?)" (266)
-"Fascism is not capitalism or any other economics, but a state of mind. It is a surrender of the soul to evil, to the t emptation of power, to the particularly murderous brand of evil that results when you substitute egotistic domineering for Christian self-restraint and when you substitute hate for mutual sympathy and substitute pre-Chrsitian, tribal loyalties of blood for post-Christian brotherhood." (266)
-"Except in the anacrhic dream of 'infantile leftists' and adolescent bohemians, freedom never means the absence of all restrictions. On the contrary, freedom is a very special and restricted type of value-framework." (290)
-"American universities have every right and duty to refuse to hire [communists:]. That no more violates academic freedom than refusing to hire a Nazi to teach a course on race relations. The American value-system allows free play in the arena of discussion to all ideologies, capitalist, socialist, monarchist, feudal, or philosophical anarchist. In turn, they must accept as prerequisite the restraints as well as privileges of that arena and that value-system. They must accord to others the same liberties they demand for themselves. Otherwise, they are ethically unfit to teach; they are unfit to preserve academic freedom." (297)
-"It is poppycock to consider any kind of threat to academic freedom, whether communist or plutocratic, the present main danger to education. The main danger is unimaginative mediocrity. This has plenty of academic freedom all right. But what does it use it for? Don't ask its students for the answer; they were snoring at the time." (304)
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