A Celebration of the Contributions of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler

A Celebration of the Contributions of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler August 19-21,1994 Aspen, Colorado Contents (interactive) Mortimer J. Adler: Philosopher at Midday- Jeffrey D. Wallin...................51 MJA, POLITICS: Summary - John Van Doren............................................76 Mortimer Adler: The Political Writings - John Van Doren........................79 Remarks – Mortimer J. Adler.......................................................................93 From the Editor’s Desk - Sydney Hyman...................................................95 Mortimer Adler and The Aspen Institute - Sidney Hyman........................99 Authors........................................................................................................118 51 Mortimer J. Adler: Philosopher at Midday Jeffrey D. Wallin ortimer J. Adler has made an unusual number of difficult M ideas accessible to “everybody.” Perhaps that is why he has been so uncharitably dismissed as a “popular” philosopher by his critics, a good number of whom come from that narrow breed of specialists once dismissed by Nietzsche as equipped at best to study the lives of a single species of insect, say, the leech, or that being too broad, perhaps only the leech’s brain. Adler is not a spe- cialist. He speaks to broad issues, issues of importance to all of us as men and women. Even more surprising, he speaks without jar- gon, evasion or irony. Unlike the owl of Minerva, which is said to begin its flight at dusk, this is one philosopher who learns and teaches in direct sunlight. Among the most important topics Adler has shed light upon are liberal education, democracy and human nature. Adler favors all of them, by the way. And nothing could further distance him from the strongest trends in American education. * * * In early May 1994 The New York Times carried a story about a controversy raging in Lake County, Florida. It seems that the county school board passed a resolution requiring teachers to teach 52 students that American culture, values and political institutions are “superior to other foreign or historic cultures.” The local teachers’ union is, as The Washington Times put it, up in arms. So are a lot of other people, including the editors of most of the nation’s pres- tigious periodicals. And well they might be, for this declaration does have something of the “whiff of grapeshot” about it. These folks have fired a meta- phorical cannonball across the bow of the good ship Multicultural- ism, the premise of which is either (take your pick): (a) no culture is superior to any other, or (b) no culture is superior to any other, except that non-Western cultures are superior to Western ones. To put the choice in a nutshell: cultural nihilism or cultural romanticism; but please, no good words for the West. Earlier this year the California State Assembly unanimously passed an act requiring all California schoolchildren to read the Constitu- tion, the Bill of Rights, and The Federalist Papers. Of course, this was before the professional educators got involved. The Senate Education Committee, headed by a former social sciences teacher, stopped this mighty danger to our liberties in its tracks by a vote of four to two. One hopes that people are still capable of being shocked by official objections to American students being required to read the U.S. Constitution. This was not, after all, a bill requiring that any par- ticular opinion about American government be taught: It merely required that students read the founding texts of the system that was proposing to educate them. Yet even a teaching regarding the superiority of the American system should hardly be considered embarrassing to democratic sen- sibilities. This country’s founders argued for public education on the ground that it would strengthen the people’s attachment to re- publican forms of government. No one then thought it strange that Americans should be taught that monarchy and aristocracy, to say nothing of ethnic tribalism and racist romanticism, whether in Europe or elsewhere, were inferior forms of government. The founders were broad-minded on the whole and not much given to burning books. But they knew where they stood. Read all you can, the founders might have said in a generous moment: but neglect John Locke and James Madison at the peril of your liberties!1 1 This is not to say that teaching the virtues of our system without a serious con- sideration of other forms of government is the best way to stimulate rational attachment to republicanism. Consider the following insightful comment on Thomas Jefferson’s views on political education: “Basic questions about the 53 What is interesting about the current debate over America’s and, in general, the West’s “values,” as people like to call them today, is that a country founded on specific political principles, well articu- lated in its relevant documents, is at such a loss to defend them to its young, even when these principles have been so clearly success- ful. And yet that is the case. Of course, the attack on American democracy—and from now on I will say simply modern democracy—is not altogether new. Morti- mer Adler wrote to defend the principle of constitutional democracy well before the term multiculturalism was coined. That he should have done so is characteristic of his life, with its demon- strated courage to speak out in favor of the truth with little or no regard for whether the truth offends or comforts. And about modern democracy he is right—although I warn in advance of caveats to come later.2 Democracy, claims Adler in the face of all those “sensitive” to the claims of both Western and non-Western despot- ism, is the only “perfectly just form of government.”3 By this Adler does not mean that any political system, including our own, is in fact perfectly just. It would be hard enough to find a single court whose every decision was perfectly just, let alone an entire legal system that could be considered just in every respect. How much harder then to expect perfection in a political system, especially in such a rough-and-ready, such a downright rambunc- tious one, as democracy? No, what is meant, I suspect, is that in principle democracy is the best regime, and that our efforts ought to be devoted to perfecting in practice what is perfect in principle. nature of man, of freedom, and of just government were open and alive in Jef- ferson’s day; he thought them through for himself and hence had a deep appre- ciation for his country’s fundamental principles. But his pro-posed curriculum transmits to posterity the answers without the questions; it runs the risk of turn- ing burning issues into dead dogma and leaving students with beliefs that are mere opinions.” Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. University Press of Kansas, 1993, p. 174. 2 Indeed, readers familiar with Adler’s views on democracy will note that I dif- fer with him already when I distinguished between ancient and modern democracy, since for Adler only modern democracy—that is, democracy based on full adult suffrage—is real democracy. What most commentators refer to as earlier or less-developed forms of democracy Adler refers to as forms of oligarchy. 3 Mortimer J. Adler, A Vision of the Future: Twelve Ideas for a Better Life and a Better Society. New York: Macmillan, 1984, p. 210. 54 But even saying this much is flying in the face of sophisticated opinion. It does not recommend itself to today’s political acolytes of that great god Cultural Pluralism, nor does it even recommend itself to professional political scientists, since most of them still operate on the basis of the fact/value distinction, in spite of deny- ing that they do so. So what is the basis of Adler’s “privileging,” as the literary theorists might put it, democracy? Nothing could be more straightforward than Adler’s answer: De- mocracy is the best form of government because other forms are based on a false view of human nature. Other systems assume that the observable differences between human beings, especially differences between the rich and the poor, and the rulers and the ruled, are permanent and natural. In the 20th century this has been augmented by an identification of superior and inferior according to race- or class-based ideology. The result is the same: a concen- tration of power into the hands of one or a few. Democracy, how- ever, is built upon the truth of human nature, namely, that “all men are created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, or are by nature equal, as Adler puts it. Because no man is the natural superior of any other man in the same way that a human is the master of his dog or his cow or his goat, no man may justly rule another without his consent. This is a principle that, through long familiarity, seems obvious. Yet few principles have been as misunderstood as the principle of democracy, as a glance at any “people’s republic” or “people’s democratic order” of this century will show. The most common mistake is to assume that since government based on the principle of equality leads to majority rule (the permanent rule of a permanent minority would be an obvious violation of the principle of equality), a majority—usually called the people, or those acting in its name—may do anything it likes. This is why a small portion of the American left in earlier decades was so susceptible to the claims of Soviet communism: It seemed to promise perfect equality under the banner of perfect power of the people. And this is also why so few Americans—although there were more than we like to admit—were attracted to Nazi-style fascism: It, after all, visibly proclaimed the rule of the few, which is not such a great attraction for a people brought up on the Declaration and the Get- tysburg Address.

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