Warning, the following radio program in title opinions is hosted by someone who believes
that the biggest danger facing our planet is thoughtlessness.
To be mindful in the face of the mindless, to think in the midst of the thoughtless, that
is the insurgent mission of this radio show.
Those of you who are not averse to the logos, please stay tuned.
The rest of you may want to change the dial now because in title opinions with Robert
Polk Harrison is about to begin.
This is KZSU Stan.
As I sound the right note or what, in title opinions, back from the day.
One of these days this war is going to end, said the dog man.
You recognize a song but not the voice, not to worry.
We decided to give our esteemed band member, Christy Wampol some time off.
Let young Audrey Musto from Carmel, California, sound off her pipes here on entitled
opinions.
Audrey Musto soaring like a bird, giving voice to the nymph who lost her voice to Juneau's
higher.
It looks so good it looks so cool.
You plunge your lips into the pool, but don't give in, don't be a fool.
You know that water is cruel.
Echo pleading with narcissist to turn his eyes away, but she's no match for the self-consuming
intensity of obsession.
Why up for a nymph after all when you can drown in self-love?
Why listen to the voice of sanity when you can sink into the enticing arms of self-an-isolation?
Why indeed?
It looks so good it looks so cool.
You plunge your lips into the pool, don't give in.
I love you boy and you love you too.
Since the world we live in these days, a world of techno narcissism that keeps us transfixed
on the image and makes us dumb.
Smart phone dumb, Facebook dumb, selfie dumb, while Echo calls on us to break the spell
of the virtual and return to the real.
Can anyone hear her anymore?
For some of us can, those of you who tune into entitled opinions can, the entitled opinions
brigade, breakers of the spell, heroes of the logos, thinkers, interlocutors, epicureans
of the soul.
Welcome back friends, welcome back.
Glasswave on KCSU.
No time for the wine skin, bring out the gin.
This love in is about to begin.
KCSU later Echo, no final farewells here on entitled opinions.
Although I'm sure it didn't feel that way to many of you who have been waiting silently
and apprehensively for this show to return to the air after more than a year of high attic
silence.
Well, here we are, a new season finally coming your way, riding the jet stream, bringing
long for rain to the parched soul of the age.
Our withering, wisened, wilted age of spiritual drought.
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Let me once again thank all of you who have kept this show alive over the years through
your beautiful emails and expressions of gratitude.
Without that steady stream of encouragement, I would have let entitled opinions quietly
die a long time ago.
Have I mentioned it's been over a year since our last confession, but your host is back
here in the studios of KZSU and here at my side, it's Dylan Montanari still working as
production manager of the show.
Do you want to say hello to our audience, Dylan?
It's nice to be back, Robert.
Well, that's great.
What's it make now?
Four years?
I think four or five, yeah.
Four or five years, that's long enough practically to receive a title to your opinions.
I know you're close on the verge of that.
So actually we might hear from you later in this season when we might do a show on Benadito
Crocher, you're at least, if not your favorite philosopher, the philosopher who is engrossing
you in your dissertation.
Let me introduce a new member of our entitled opinions that keep this year.
Jim and Chen, Truman is an undergraduate here at Stanford, majoring in political philosophy,
and why don't you say hello to the entitled opinions for gay Truman?
Hi, everyone.
Thanks for having me.
You can't see them.
You can't hear them, but they're out there all over this mortal planet of ours, believe
me.
So Truman, I actually want to thank you for being the first person to mention the name
of Randolph-Borne to me, and that was back this spring, I think in the month of May before
I was leaving to Europe, radical will is a book that collects almost all of the essays he
wrote over the brief course of his life.
And I took that with me and I read through almost all of it, I think maybe even all of
it.
And I was really astounded and impressed by this singular voice of his, of an American,
and that's why I've decided that I'm going to devote most of today's show to Borne because
he's an intellectual whose voice in my view resounds almost magically across the whole
20th century and into our own 21st century.
So since you're the one who brought him to my attention, first question, where did you
come across Borne?
Well, I took a seminar last spring with the political philosopher Alan Ryan, and the topic
of the seminar was essentially roads not taken in American political philosophy.
So just kind of more alternative takes on social commentary.
And Borne was one of the major voices that he wanted to talk about in the class.
Actually a major voice in the class, that's good to know because I have been asking people
ever since I started reading him two months ago, whether they've heard of Borne, I've
been talking about it very few people who actually know the name.
I'll just ask you to introduce him and then we can hear his voice from the essays that
I brought with me today.
Yeah, sure.
Well, Randolph Borne was a leftist public intellectual that lived in the early 20th century,
as you said.
He often wrote for esteemed publications such as the New Republic.
He was a medical friend, but included people such as Herbert Crowley, Walter Lippman, and John
Dewey, who were all major intellectuals at the time.
And he was actually a student of Dewey during his time at Columbia, and Dewey's pragmatism
had an events, immense influence on Borne's approach to social issues.
He is however probably best remembered for his political dispute with Dewey over Dewey's
support of the First World War.
And Borne claimed that Dewey's pragmatism essentially perverted into a sort of aimless
and purposeless instrumentalism that could just be manipulated by the American state during
the First World War.
Dewey actually retaliated with hostility and managed to get Borne removed from the last
major publications for which he wrote.
So this effectively ruined Borne's career, and although freedom of speech did come more
easily after the war ended, Borne just died tragically soon after in the 1918 Spanish flu
pandemic.
Exactly.
So you say that we're going to go back to the question of the polemic between Dewey
and Borne later in the show.
And I actually didn't know that Dewey had actively tried to get Borne's publications
suppressed by the venues in which he was publishing them.
You mentioned the new republic, there was also the Atlantic Monthly, the Dial, and I knew
that many of their readers and sponsors of those journals were objecting to the fact
that it was giving full airtime as it were to someone who was such a critic of Woodrow
Wilson's policy of intervention at a time when all the froth of patriotic sentiment
was stirred up by the decision to go to war.
And if indeed Dewey did actively intervene to suppress or silence Borne's voice, that
disappoints me greatly in John Dewey, whom from many points of view I do admire.
Yeah, not the best part of this life.
However, as we'll mention later, I think that Dewey came to realize that Borne was on the
right side of certain issues during that polemic.
Now you mentioned that Borne died of the Spanish flu, and I think that's significant,
because the Spanish flu took place in 1918.
It was one of the worst sort of, let's say, kill-offs in human history, where anywhere
from 20 to 50 million, according to the estimates, people actually died of the pandemic.
And this is directly related to the First World War.
So what I would propose to do this hour is to focus on Borne as a public leftist intellectual,
but also on the First World War, because we are now in the 100th anniversary of that
war, and it's impossible to understand most of Borne's major writings without taking
stock of that event.
And I mentioned the Spanish flu, because I think the consensus now is that this horrible
pandemic had killed one million Americans alone in the United States at a time when America's
population was one-third the size of it is now, so we have to imagine three million
of our fellow Americans perishing in a epidemic like that.
Apart from all the other millions upon millions of combatants, as well as civilians who
died around the world, it was probably in my view the most calamitous event in Western
civilization still to this day, not just in itself, but also because of what other sorts
of horrors and catastrophes had unleashed.
And I'm thinking here of the Spanish flu, which was due to the overcrowding of barracks
by the soldiers on the Western Front, it originated, we know in France and the Western Front
at the end of the war, but that world war also is created the conditions for the Bolshevik
Revolution, and we can go on and tally the untold dead that resulted as a result of those
initial conditions with world communism and the millions upon millions upon millions
that were sacrificed to that.
The Second World War was a direct consequence of the First World War and no need to say more about
that.
Also, the Armenian genocide that took place shortly after the First World War there in the
Eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire and on and on.
Again, we have not finished living the consequences of that war.
So today as we go back and listen to someone who was a very vociferous, eloquent, pacifist,
making a case for why it was a form of per blindness, if not craziness, for Woodrow Wilson
to enter into that war, believing that by so doing he was going to create the conditions
for a world democracy, I think there's a lot of reasons to go back and listen to what
he had to say about that.
But before we do that, I'm curious, you're an undergraduate, you're a junior now, you're
about 19 years of age.
Does the First World War mean anything to you?
Does it enter into your historical awareness as something that might have all these
direct and indirect causal links to the world that we inhabit now or is it just as remote
from you and your generations consciousness as the Trojan War or something?
Well, I've had the fortune of having some great history and also English teachers that
went through pretty thoroughly the First World War and its horrors and its indirect consequences.
But if I were to just read the news day to day, just like anybody else by age, the First
World War would not really show up explicitly.
The Second World War is still in the public imagination to some degree, but it's already
fading.
Of course, that's not exactly the case in certain of the European countries that got hit
most hard by the war.
England is the First World War is still very much a part of the living consciousness of many
English people because of the millions upon millions of young Englishmen who died in the
flower of their youth.
It France the same thing.
It's just unbelievable to go to village and towns and cities all around the country and see
the names of the dead on all the public monuments.
Those who had left those hometowns in order to perish in the trenches.
All for no purpose whatsoever because the First World War did not resolve really anything,
which is why they're at to be a second one.
Even here, our own campus of Stanford, it's called the Stanford Memorial University.
In the Memorial Quad, there you'll see all the names of many, many individuals who left
Stanford to go and die over there in Europe in the trenches.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but we need to go back to it because I think there are
still lessons that we have to learn from what happened then and what could again happen,
not maybe in the same form as the World War, but in other forms that we're living through
today.
So there's an essay that Randolph-Borne wrote that never got published, it's called
the disillusionment and I would like to focus primarily on this essay for the next few
minutes or so and read copiously from it so that our audience can get a sense of his own
distinct voice in this matter.
And let me, however, mention in the supplement, your biography that this essay is a one
of several essays, he never wrote a Magnus Opus of any sort.
He is really known as an essayist, collection of essays that he wrote in journals and when
he died, there was found in the waste paper basket, let me tell him, the essay that he's
probably most famous for, would you agree, that's called the state?
Yeah, and his most famous phrase, that the war is the health of the state also comes
from that unfinished essay.
Right, it's an unfinished essay, remarkable political piece of political analysis of what
is a state where he makes a distinction between fundamental distinction between the state
and the country, and government.
Where the country is a society, people who share a common language, common customs,
and women, traditions, and a history, the state is, on the other hand, a repository of
force and it is driven to amass more and more power and exert more and more control and
uniformity and regimentation of the society, which, without which, it could not exist because
it draws all of its resources from the society, right, financial resources, material
resources, human resources and so forth, no.
And I think that line that you quoted war as the health of the state is the result of
a realization that he underwent during his experience of this First World War.
Here is Randolph-born talking about the period just before the outbreak of the First World
War.
He writes, "They told us that war was becoming economically impossible.
They said that the Great European nations were on the verge of bankruptcy, riding to a
colossal fall, for they could neither stop the mad competitive arms race nor continue it
without having the whole system crash into ruin."
They said that the all-powerful coterie of international bankers who held in their hands
the leading strings of the nations would never permit their resources to be plundered
and their credits shattered by a world war.
They showed us indubitably that in these days of international economic interdependence
of inextricably interlacing communications and financial obligations, the very instinct of self-protection
would keep the most belligerent nation from making the suicidal assault upon its own life
and prosperity that war would be.
At the more the world became one vast market and the more each nation's economic interest
became definitively implicated in those of the others, just so much the more unready would
be any government that had the welfare and greatness of the nation at heart to cut all these
implicating arteries of life and drain its prosperity to death.
They showed us conclusively that the most triumphant trampling down of the despised enemy could
bring no economic gain to the conqueror and that the utmost tribute that could be exactly
would be more costly and less profitable than the income from the international trade
that now flowed voluntarily across the borders.
It's completely rational to me, you know, the problem being that reason does not always or
even most frequently rule geopolitics and international events.
I'm going to continue with your permission.
They said that our world would be saved by the very materiality what today we would call
materialism of the 20th century civilization.
These lusty nations, talking about the nations of Western Europe, the prosperous nations
that had emerged from the industrial revolution with a great deal more prosperity and
well-being than it ever been known before.
These lusty nations with their growing wealth, their love of pleasure, their increasing
scorn for ideals would be unnerved by lease and become ever more averse to the sacrifices
of war.
The prosperous classes would refuse to sanction offensive war.
I go on, they told us that war was becoming physically impossible.
The very magnitude of the armaments was making their employment hazardous.
It seemed incredible that any modern government would take the initiative of letting loose
these incalculable engines of destruction.
The more formidable and complicated the armaments became, the safer were we in reality from
their use.
Does that sound familiar at all?
Sounds like a logic of nuclear deterrence.
Nuclear deterrence and nuclear armaments.
If born could have even imagined what would follow after the First World War in terms
of the insane amassing of weapons of mass destruction for which the First World War was
really almost like a little joke compared to what comes later, then all this becomes more
and more ominous to us as we read on in this essay.
I continue.
They pointed to the vast growth of international travel and intellectual intercourse this continued
interest and mutual contact stimulated by so many varying motives could only produce an understanding
and sympathy that would make it ever more difficult for the most war like of governments
to set their peoples at each other's throats.
The international mind was becoming more and more universal so that an inter-European
war would be dreaded with the horror of a civil conflict.
They said, and we almost believed that a new international morality was arising with a
social control of the national sentiments through the agency of customs, agreements,
and the pressure of opinion, this new morality had only to be codified to become the
Constitution of a veritable federation of the world.
But mostly we relied on the organized working classes of Europe to tie the hands of those
who would menace world peace.
The international socialist movement with its record of revolutions and battles behind
it faced with clearest eye and steadiest head the militaristic state, the common enemy
of all workers and Democrats no matter what patriotic nationality it paraded.
Eternal war against war, if the bourgeois states fought it would have to be without the
proletariat.
And in this litany of promises that such a thing could never possibly occur, born goes
on to ask, were we deluded into feeling everywhere a vast over spreading weariness for
war and for all this ceaseless soaring preparation?
This low-ling quietude of the peoples that seemed to auger a gradual emergence from the
black nightmare that had waited for so long a time, was it nothing but the last breathless
hush before the impending horror?
All Europe seemed to be on the verge of a 20th century renaissance recalls born.
And this is an important passage because here he is speaking about this kind of special
feeling of elation and optimism and sense of having finally overcome all those pitfalls and
elements of the past that keep us mired in the misery of our long fitful history as
a species.
All Europe seemed to be on the verge of a 20th century renaissance, regeneration seemed to
be everywhere at hand.
Pessimism and restlessness seemed to have given place everywhere to an outburst of
Edenol, everywhere a vast impatience with the old mean ways of living, an anger at squalor
and muddle, everywhere a burst of expansion, a discontent with the shabbiness that we
and America still so complacently suffer, a desire for more air, more light, more expression.
It seemed to see all lines converging toward a civilization of this century, opulent, free,
daring, and clear-sided, set on a basis of material prosperity and scientific control
of resources that was to develop gradually a state of diffused well-being far beyond what
the world had ever hoped.
War on squalor and ugliness was being waged on every hand the amazing development of
civic art, town planning, the brilliant and fakun progress of industrial and decorative
arts, all the more impressive against the degradation of painting and music seemed to mean
the establishment of new social values and social taste, and taste is, after all, the only
morality.
See if it were up to me, true, that would be the line he's most remembered for, not
war is the health of the state, but taste is, after all, the only morality.
Those of you, among our listeners who know the spirit of the beginning decades of the
twentieth century know exactly what he's referring to in terms of this newness springing
up everywhere and that kind of vital energy at the cultural level and this commitment to
town planning and reforming of all sorts of institutions and art forms and mores and social
and moral codes.
This all seem to be part of a distaste for previous modes of oppression and rigid forms
of classicism or academic art and a new kind of taste for life, taste is a beautiful
word because it's indefinite and it's vague, but it does point to this phenomenon.
I no longer have a taste for the squalor and the ugliness of it.
Now I have a taste now for this other new thing and where taste leads the way, morality
will follow in its wake.
I don't know if that first place is, but it's pretty persuasive.
If I had more time to think about it, I'd be more eloquent on it.
I continue.
One long fought for values seemed to have been definitely one, sex equality, freedom of
speech, secular control of education in every country the ecclesiastical power had been
mortally defeated and was in full retreat.
But the New Years of the Century were not a mere working out of the tendencies of the
old.
They were new ideals, new philosophies, new sensitiveness.
With the old Christian civilization with its taint of defeat and sacrifice and the new scientific
civilization with its hard and uninspired craftiness seemed to be giving way to a new
social and pragmatic civilization with direction and purpose and at all.
Something in the early years of the 20th century seemed to have suddenly opened the eyes
of Europe on an infinitely wider horizon.
The fight with the old was not over, but men believed they had found the track and began
to press toward that with conviction and courage.
Well, all right, Truman here now comes the shock of disillusionment with the outbreak of the
war.
I quote, "In the first shock of disillusionment when the world seemed to turn black and
sick around us, all this civilization that we had been so hopefully watching turned a ghastly
mockery in the presence of this grim superhuman power," which is the militaristic state.
So eternal, so indomitable.
Once more, we had to learn that it had conquered.
We had to taste all the bitterness of the truth that this incredible.
Which everybody feared and nobody expected had happened.
The precise combination of all the evil coincidences had occurred and in the presence
of the opportunity, this militarism, which for 40 years had been playing with the fate
of nations, was to be like adamant against all those human and rational considerations that
are hopes and good wills had been creating below it.
That's it, isn't it?
I think people believe that rationalism ultimately will control social and political destiny,
especially because rationalism is associated with self-interest.
So there's this famous rational self-interest argument that no one would willfully do something
that's against their self-interest.
But how many times have we seen that premise be exposed as completely inadequate to the events
that take place in the geospolitical sphere?
Not only a century ago, as we're talking about now, but even in our own time.
Yeah, I mean, if you were really to subscribe to rational self-interest, then you would
have no room for the concept of doing something that's counterproductive to your own
intentions.
Sure.
Or, uh, murdering yourself.
Or, uh, as you say, counterproductive to your own, uh, your own interests and intentions.
Well, let's go on then.
One had only to hear the Kaiser speak to his people on that historic day in Berlin and see
that sinister, helmeted figure, the very personification of non-human irrational force
to realize how little weight all those notions of personal social or even national welfare
would have against the grandiose ideals of prestige, aggrandizement, and imperialism incarnated
in him.
We realize with a shock that all through the years of this blossoming new civilization,
there had been left either through neglect or fear or ignorance.
There had been left in control of the destinies of great people's powers, which had their
roots in ages that considered death more glorious in life, empty honor more desirable than
material well-being, conquest and destruction more splendid than conservation.
The nations had allowed themselves to be left in the clutch of top sea-turvy valuations
that rated all these things that we considered precious and desirable.
The prosperity and wealth, spiritual and material of the countries as mere ammunition and
rations for predatory war rather than anything in themselves, excellent and life-enhancing.
We had not really believed that they existed in the world and initiative capable of
willing the world war, and we had to learn not only that there was such a power but also
the persistent ruthlessness of its initiative.
We had to learn that in the antique top sea-turvy valuation that obsessed the emperor's,
economic prudences would weigh no more than would social ideals.
The delicate structure of international finance and credit would be brushed contemptuously
aside like cobwebs while they went direct to the material resources of their countries,
which they were prepared to drain and bleed to the point of exhaustion.
No sorted question of cost or even gain seemed to have tainted the initiative in this most
irrational of all wars, no arguments or appeals that the modern world could present would be of
any avail for the archaic international military cast is not of this world.
So here is the shock of disillusionment and the question we want to ask ourselves before
we turn to the end of the essay where he draws some kind of lessons or some kind of realization
from what happened in that year of 1914.
We really should take stock of where we stand politically speaking in the world and what
the power of the adivistic, what power the adivistic still holds upon states as well as
the psychology of the people, no?
Because one of his arguments about war is that when the state engages in war, it does
so really as the enemy of the country and the enemy of the people and the enemy of its economy
and its happiness and its well-being, but that somehow when the state decides to go to war,
it also unleashes in the people, in most of its people, what he calls the mob fanaticism
and the herd mentality which rallies to the cause of the state and where tolerance then
gives way to intolerance and so forth and that somehow there is something so intoxicating
about war that were not the case, no states could ever go to war the way Europe went to
war with itself in that time.
And we are far from having overcome that madness no matter how obvious it is in retrospect
the absurdity of those events and how they led to nothing but the what Warren here calls
this going direct to the material and human resources of the countries which they were
prepared to drain and bleed to the point of exhaustion.
So let's ask if there anything in his realization of what happened that he that can be
a relevance to us from this essay and he mentions towards the end there that there have
gone down so many ideals with all those ideals that complacent 19th century philosophy
of progress upon which the peace movement was based, that illusion which has hallucinated
us for so long that the world is moving in solid for lengths onward and upward forever.
We have been obsessed with evolution, moral evolution, political evolution and we have
believed that a certain level had been reached that permanent acquisitions had been made,
that they had been rendered relatively safe.
This colossal shock has opened our eyes to the instability of our world today, neither in
political nor moral nor social values where we safely secured, where the world improves,
we must learn, it improves in spots, it is a kaleidoscope where the same elements make
strangely different combinations and a movement to serange the pattern.
Progress is always local and empirical, it is always on the defense and I think that's
a lesson that we are well as buys to heed here that progress is always local and empirical,
always on the defensive and all this disillusionment has taught us and in addition that
morality is not a mere acquirement but the reflecting of situations, the site's emphasis
on situations, very important and that men who are fighting for their lives and believe
they are being betrayed will become savages even in the midst of civilization.
It is to situations that we must look and not expect amiable sentiments to guarantee
the world.
This is something that has direct pertinence I think to our time because so many of us believe
that with the right sentiments, amiable sentiments that that is sufficient political
engagement, that if we are on the side of angels and if we keep preaching the gospel of angels
and keep behaving with amiable sentiments that everything is going to be okay but all the amiable
sentiments in the world will do nothing against the unleashing of the forces of destruction
because as he says elsewhere while we were engaged in amiable sentiments, the emperors
were drilling their soldiers.
We should not ever get complacent that our sentiments are somehow efficacious or have some
kind of pragmatic consequence in this kind of world that he's evoking.
I'm actually reminded of the social philosopher Ivan Illich when it comes to this.
He had a famous essay that borrowed from I think an Irish proverb or just some proverb and
they used it and it was called the "Ago's the Road to Hell" was paved with good intentions.
Well sure that's become such a well-known proverb that it's become almost a cliche.
It seems that every time you enter some kind of administrator's office, they have a little
sign up on their wall saying the way to hell is paved by good intentions.
But I think he means something different in this case even than that because and here we
can talk a little bit about the controversy with John Dewey because to have good intentions
and also be translated to mean that one has worthy ideals or objectives.
This whole notion that an end, a noble end will justify the means, could be what the
good intentions paved the way to hell because you're willing to use any means necessary
to achieve ends which are always posited as noble and worthy and desirable and yet history,
actually much more often than not, is the story of the playing out of the means rather
than the achievement of ends.
And this is what we call ideology in the political sphere where through the more what
G-Shik calls the sublime object of ideology.
If you posit a sublime object of ideology and then you go to war on behalf of it, it's
the means that perpetuate the nightmare of history and the ends always seem to recede further
and further into some kind of unattainability.
Yeah.
I'm also reminded of Camus meditations on the means and ends.
Hey, Rope, I think in the rebel, if the end justifies the means then what is left to justify
the end and it can only be the means.
Exactly.
And by the way, the end justifies the means is, most people believe it's a direct quote
from Makievelli, it's the prince and trust me, I've won many bets on this that you will
actually not find anywhere in the prince that phrase.
You will find things that imply it that in a circumlocution say it but not exactly that
phrase that the end justifies the means.
But here again, Truman, let's go back to the controversy between Randolph-Borne and
his once mentor and teacher and the philosopher that he was a devout disciple of and whose
pragmatism he embraced, and we John Dewey, where when Dewey supported Woodrow Wilson's
decision to intervene in the First World War.
He was following Woodrow Wilson's spiel that by entering the war we can bring about a desired
end which is to make the world hospitable to democracy.
And even though we have to do it through these means, the end will justify that.
Dewey said more or less the same thing that going to war would could serve the end of
democracy and Borne says no, it doesn't work that way for a number of reasons.
First, because war, as he says, is inexorable that once you commit to it, it takes on a logic
of its own and very quickly the purpose of war is not to bring democracy to the world, but
the purpose of war is to win it at all costs and to then if you once you win it to take
as much as you can.
And therefore to ennoble the means of war is naive and illusory.
And he also believed that Dewey did not think properly about democracy when he embraced
this decision.
No?
Right.
He thought that Dewey had a very vague understanding of what democracy really was.
And that's true to some extent.
Dewey only really fully fleshed out his understanding of democracy and the political philosophy
in the mid-20s.
But then what are we to make of the fact that in the twilight of the idols where he really
goes after Dewey and exposes all the inconsistencies in the logic of using these barbarous
savage insane means to arrive at a noble end?
He also criticizes pragmatism or at least Dewey's version of pragmatism as having a singular
lack of poetic vision that in its obsession with the pragmatic adjustment of means to
materiality that it was unable to inspire anyone with the kind of power that ideals have
to inspire.
And therefore he says that what is needed most of all by the intellectual class that had
completely capitulated to Wilson.
So much so that he being one of the lone dissenters was, as you said, he was expelled from
the public sphere.
He could no longer publish.
But he said that what is most necessary is for those intellectuals who had shown themselves
in the moment of crisis to be bankrupt and feckless, no matter how pragmatic they were because
they were caught up maybe in an instrumentalism so that we need people to create ideals.
And let me read you a quote and get your reaction.
Here is...
Okay, I'm going to read a quote here that also has some relevance to the title of our
radio program called entitled "Pinions," as you know.
So here's what he has to say about three phenomena inter-connected belief, opinion,
faith, out of fourth ideals.
He writes, "We are passing out of the faith era and belief as an intellectual attitude
has almost ceased to play an active part in our life.
In the scientific attitude there is no place whatever for belief nor has belief any
place in the loose indecisive issues of ordinary living."
If only that were the case in this election year.
We have to act constantly on insufficient evidence on the best opinion we can get.
That is a modern enlightened, in the good sense of the word enlightened, dictum.
We have to act constantly on insufficient evidence on the best opinion we can get.
And you know where you get the best opinions.
It's right here on this show.
But opinion is not belief and we are lost if we treat it so.
The belief is dogmatic but opinion has value only when it is tentative and questioning.
The fact is that modern thinking, the fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief
has given way to what might be called higher plausibility.
But in modern thinking there is no hostility to faith.
If by faith we mean only an emotional core of desire driving towards some ideal.
But idealism is a very different thing from belief.
Belief is impaled from behind, it is sterile and fixed.
Belief has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse.
An ideal on the other hand is an illumined end toward which our hopes and endeavors converge.
It looks forward and pulls us along with it.
It is ideals and not beliefs that should motivate the modern.
That all sounds very beautiful to me except when I reflect on what you were saying earlier that
sometimes the ideals are the wrong ones.
And he uses that word ideal in the disillusionment essay that I was reading from where he said that the military cast was
still prey to those old ideals.
They were ideals.
They might have been the wrong ones.
The ideals of honor, prestige, aggrandizement and empire.
And of course, ideologies, totalitarianism could be fascism, notism, communism, that they
posit ideals and they do tap into this inner core, emotional core of desire driving towards some ideal.
And that ideal in the First World War and even more in the Second World War really took the form of nationalism,
which we know born was horrified by.
And maybe this is something that you were telling me of here, Lenin might have realized at the time of the First World War that something that marks himself was not particularly sensitive to.
Namely, the nation can draw you into these passions.
Lenin was similarly just as upset as born was when the First World War broke out and the working class essentially split across their nations.
Lenin became a lot more pessimistic as a result of the First World War and also he also at that time because of the split belief that he wouldn't live to see the socialist revolution anymore.
And I'm just betting that born felt very similarly in the sense of hope.
Well, in fact, in the disillusionment essay that I read from, he mentions that above all he trusted in the socialist, the social democrats who had fought these battles and revolutions and that he trusted them to know that the warring cast, the militaristic cast was their enemy and that they were going to go to war without the proletariat.
But it turned out that he that that was wrong because the working class rallied to the call of nationalism.
There's something in that ideal that can be corrosive and pathologically effective in mobilization.
So this leaves a question of well, two questions. Does that mean that ideals are bad that we do without them because they have been used to mobilize war and war?
Or does it mean that those on the other side of the of the issue need to find a way to combat one passion with another passion because it's not reason that can ever triumph over passion only a passion can banquish another passion.
And that maybe engendering a passion for an emotional core of desire towards ideals of another sort is what the task of the intellectual is.
Right. I think this is where the importance of born's meditation on opinion also comes in in his, his hope that society was start looking more like a scientific community with a scientific attitude where intellectuals are people thinking people.
Thinking people can come together and contest each other's opinions and go for the more plausible one.
Yeah, that's that's an ideal world except that that requires a certain moderation, a certain respect for the law of reason and the rules of evidence.
And of course, these are all the things that were swept away contemptuously and brutally with the outbreak of war which ignited much deeper sources of passion that are associated with ideals and I have a feeling that what born would like what were poets of of other ideals.
So for example, a born is very well known for an essay he wrote on transnational America. Have you read that essay? Yeah, yeah.
Where he is against the whole notion of a melting pot that and he's against the fact that people come to America and have to subject themselves to Anglo-Saxonism.
This identification of America with an Anglo-Saxonism is something that he was very much against and he thought that America could and should be a cosmopolitan transnational country where all sorts of pluralistic cultures and traditions could coexist in a kind of, let's say, national framework, transnational framework which we're not sure about.
And it's a very, very important framework which would be completely unprecedented in history. Yeah.
And it's especially relevant nowadays with the revival of the debate on immigration in the upcoming election with people like Palin and Trump talking about deporting, quote-unquote, anchor babies and also revoking the 14th Amendment and stuff like that.
Yes, and a renewed debate about whether English should be not only the primary but also the only language and the very first show of entitled opinions 10 years ago, by the way, this is a 10th anniversary of entitled opinions.
Our very first show I quoted the Texas Governor mob Ferguson when the Texas legislature was trying to introduce a bill that would make Spanish instruction in high schools and grade schools.
We could introduce them to all the schools in Texas so that the school children could learn if they wanted to, you know, Spanish.
And she said, "Not while I'm governor of this state, if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Texas school children." Namely, our Anglo-Saxonism goes all the way back to Jesus Christ and it's somehow sanctified as the law of the land.
And this is something born, it was the about critic of, I don't want to say it's an enemy because to call him an enemy of anything is already to put him in the kind of warfare that his pacifism radically rejected.
But he had a very different vision of what America could have been, so going back to the title of the course that you followed, "Roads Not Taken," that is one road America never took, which has to become a transnational nation rather than...
A nativeist nation. Right. But there you go, the hour passes very quickly. We're getting to the end of our hour. Do you want to add anything to the reflections we've been pursuing on Randolph-Borne and leave our audience with some thoughts of your own? I know that you're very interested in Alberca Muev as a thinker and you think that he has particular sort of relevance and parallels and that he's someone who engages fruitfully in conversation.
fully in conversation with some of the American thinkers.
Do you want to say a little bit more about Kamu
before we terminate our show?
- Yeah, a lot of scholars note that Kamu ends up
in his political philosophy very similar
to the American pragmatists.
So with that in mind, I immediately put together
born and Kamu in one picture
and found that they had a very similar,
you know a Mediterranean attitude,
but also their political philosophy is interestingly enough,
kind of end up in a very similar place,
even though they start from different ends.
With Randolph-Borne, for example,
he's reacting to a over emphasis on means
it's in adapting to the situation
and this sort of rabid instrumentalism.
So he's searching for more of a poetic vision,
whereas Kamu is reacting to an over emphasis
on these ideals and ideologies.
So he's trying to push back and trying to go back
to more focus on the means as well.
But Kamu does end with this,
what he calls a dialectic between freedom and justice,
where freedom and justice find their limits in each other
so they don't go out of control.
So this is very delicate balance forces,
essentially, in a local kind of area.
And Borne ends up at that very similar balance,
I think, with what he suggests.
- For sure, there's a lot there in the rebel
that one can bring into dialogue with Randolph-Borne,
which is one more confirmation that the mind of Borne
was fertile and still full of potential
for our own revisitation.
- I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
We had to get this show started again
and we decided to devote our first show of the season
to Randolph-Borne and to welcome Truman Chen,
who is an undergraduate at Stanford.
You hear him, and then if you believe that all
Stanford undergraduates are at his level,
you're sorting mistaken, he's an exceptional one.
That's why we have him here in the studios of KZSU
and we are going to be back with you
with a number of shows that should keep you
in a state of thoughtfulness as we go through this season.
- Thank you. - Take care. Bye bye.
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