The communists are involved, among others; but, like the others, they are merely the manipulators, not the cause, of the student rebellion. This is an example of the fart that whenever they win, they win by default—like germs feeding on the sores of a disintegrating body. They did not create the conditions that are destroying American universities—they did not create the hordes of embittered, aimless, neurotic teen-agers—but they do know how to attack through the sores which their opponents insist on evading. They are professional ideologists, and it is not difficult for them to move into an intellectual vacuum and to hang the cringing advocates of “anti-ideology” by their own contradictions.
For its motley leftist leadership, the student rebellion is a trial balloon, a kind of cultural temperature-taking. It is a test of how much they can get away with and what sort of opposition they will encounter.
For the rest of us, it is a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what is to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remains unchallenged.
The country at large is a mirror of its universities. The practical result of modern philosophy is today’s mixed economy with its moral nihilism, its range-of-the-moment pragmatism, its anti-ideological ideology, and its truly shameful recourse to the notion of “Government by Consensus.”
Rule by pressure groups is merely the prelude, the social conditioning for mob rule. Once a country has accepted the obliteration of moral principles, of individual rights, of objectivity, of justice, of reason, and has submitted to the rule of legalized brute force—the elimination of the concept “legalized” does not take long to follow. Who is to resist it—and in the name of what?
When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment’s “stability,” of peace at any price, is their only goal—the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so. If there were no communists or other thugs in the world, such a system would create them.
The more an official is committed to the policy of compromise, the less able he is to resist anything: to give in, is his “instinctive” response in any emergency, his basic principle of conduct, which makes him an easy mark.
In this connection, the extreme of naive superficiality was reached by those commentators who expressed astonishment that the student rebellion had chosen Berkeley as its first battleground and President Kerr as its first target in spite of his record as a “liberal” and as a renowned mediator and arbitrator. “Ironically, some of the least mature student spokesmen … tried to depict Mr. Kerr as the illiberal administrator,” said an editorial in The New York Times (March 11, 1965). “This was, of course, absurd in view of Mr. Kerr’s long and courageous battle to uphold academic freedom and students’ rights in the face of those right-wing pressures that abound in California.” Other commentators pictured Mr. Kerr as an innocent victim caught between the conflicting pressures of the “conservatives” on the Board of Regents and the “liberals” on the faculty. But, in fact and in logic, the middle of the road can lead to no other final destination— and it is clear that the rebels chose Clark Kerr as their first target, not in spite of, but because of his record.
Now project what would happen if the technique of the Berkeley rebellion were repeated on a national scale. Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim. If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at die suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.
Who would feel morally inspired to fight for Johnson’s “consensus”? Who fought for the aimless platitudes of the Kerensky government in Russia—of the Weimar Republic in Germany—of the Nationalist government in China?
But no matter how badly demoralized and philosophically disarmed a country might be, it has to reach a certain psychological turning point before it can be pushed from a state of semi-freedom into surrender to full-fledged dictatorship. And this was the main ideological purpose of the student rebellion’s leaders, whoever they were: to condition the country to accept force as the means of settling political controversies.
Observe the ideological precedents which the Berkeley rebels were striving to establish: all of them involved the abrogation of rights and the advocacy of force. These notions have been publicized, yet their meaning has been largely ignored and left unanswered.
1. The main issue was the attempt to make the country accept mass civil disobedience as a proper and valid tool of political action. This attempt has been made repeatedly in connection with the civil rights movement. But there the issue was confused by the fact that the Negroes were the victims of legalized injustice and, therefore, the matter of breaching legality did not become unequivocally clear. The country took it as a fight for justice, not as an assault on the law.
Civil disobedience may be justifiable, in some cases, when and if an individual disobeys a law in order to bring an issue to court, as a test case. Such an action involves respect for legality and a protest directed only at a particular law which the individual seeks an opportunity to prove to be unjust. The same is true of a group of individuals when and if the risks involved are their own.
But there is no justification, in a civilized society, for the kind of mass civil disobedience that involves the violation of the rights of others—regardless of whether the demonstrators’ goal is good or evil. The end does not justify the means. No one’s rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others. Mass disobedience is an assault on the concept of rights: it is a mob’s defiance of legality as such.
The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The only power of a mob, as against an individual, is greater muscular strength—i.e., plain, brute physical force. The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.
Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions. And the degree of today’s intellectual chaos and context-dropping was best illustrated by some “conservative” California official who rushed to declare that he objects to the Berkeley rebellion, but respects civil disobedience as a valid American tradition. “Don’t forget the Boston Tea Party,” he said, forgetting it.
If the meaning of civil disobedience is somewhat obscured in the civil rights movement—and, therefore, the attitude of the country is inconclusive—that meaning becomes blatantly obvious when a sit-in is staged on a university campus. If the universities—the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization—can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked.
2. To facilitate the acceptance of force, the Berkeley rebels
attempted to establish a special distinction between force and
violence: force, they claimed explicitly, is a proper form of
social action, but violence is not Their definition of the terms
was as follows: coercion by means of a literal physical con