The Dogmas of our Times
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from: The Freeman, June, 1956]
The following essay by Frank Chodorov first
appeared in The Freeman (June 1956) and then in a
slightly different form as the introduction to The Rise and
Fall of Society. This version comes from a 1980 collection
of Chodorov's writings, titled, Fugitive Essays.
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What history will think of our times is something that only
history will reveal. But, it is a good guess that it will select
collectivism as the identifying characteristic of the twentieth
century. For even a quick survey of the developing pattern of
thought during the past fifty years shows up the dominance of one
central idea: that society is a transcendent entity, something apart
and greater than the sum of its parts, possessing a suprahuman
character and endowed with like capacities. It operates in a field
of its own, ethically and philosophically, and is guided by stars
unknown to mortals. Hence, the individual, the unit of society,
cannot judge it by his own limitations or apply to it standards by
which he measures his own thinking and behavior. He is necessary to
it, of course, but only as a replaceable part of a machine. It
follows, therefore, that society, which may concern itself
paternalistically with individuals, is in no way dependent on them.
In one way or another, this idea has insinuated itself into almost
every branch of thought and, as ideas have a way of doing, has
become institutionalized. Perhaps the most glaring example is the
modern orientation of the philosophy of education. Many of the
professionals in this field frankly assert that the primary purpose
of education is not to develop the individual's capacity for
learning, as was held in the past, but to prepare him for a fruitful
and "happy" place in society; his inclinations must be
turned away from himself, so that he can adjust himself to the mores
of his age group and beyond that to the social milieu in which he
will live out is life. He is not an end in himself.
Jurisprudence has come around to the same idea, holding more and
more that human behavior is not a matter of personal responsibility
as much as it is a reflection of the social forces working on the
individual; the tendency is to shift onto society the blame for
crimes committed by its members. This, too, is a tenet of sociology,
the increasing popularity of which, and its elevation to a science,
attest to the hold collectivism has on our times. The scientist is
no longer honored as a bold adventurer into the unknown, in search
of nature's principles, but has become a servant of society, to
which he owes his training and his keep. Heroes and heroic exploits
are being demoted to accidental outcroppings of mass thought and
movement. The superior person, the self-starting "captain of
industry," the inherent geniusthese are fictions; all are
but robots made by society. Economics is the study of how society
makes a living, under its own techniques and prescriptions, not how
individuals, in pursuit of happiness, go about the making of a
living. And philosophy, or what goes by that name, has made truth
itself an attribute of society.
Statism is not a modern invention. Even before Plato, political
philosophy concerned itself with the nature, origin, and
justification of the state. But, while the thinkers speculated on
it, the general public accepted political authority as a fact to be
lived with and let it go at that. It is only within recent times
(except, perhaps, during periods when church and state were one,
thus endowing political coercion with divine sanction) that the mass
of people has consciously or implicitly accepted the Hegelian dictum
that "the state is the general substance, whereof individuals
are but the accidents." It is this acceptance of the state as "substance,"
as a suprapersonal reality, and its investment with a competence no
individual can lay claim to, that is the special characteristic of
the twentieth century.
In times past, the disposition was to look upon the state as
something one had to reckon with, but as a complete outsider. One
got along with the state as best one could, feared or admired it,
hoped to be taken in by it and to enjoy its perquisites, or held it
at arm's length as an untouchable thing; one hardly thought of the
state as the integral of society. One had to support the statethere
was no way of avoiding taxesand one tolerated its
interventions as interventions, not as the warp and woof of life.
And the state itself was proud of its position apart from, and
above, society.
The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between
state and society, conceptually or institutionally. The state is
society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political
establishment, depending on it for sustenance, health, education,
communications, and all things coming under the head of "the
pursuit of happiness." In theory, taking college textbooks on
economics and political science for authority, the integration is
about as complete as words can make it. In the operation of human
affairs, despite the fact that lip service is rendered to the
concept of inherent personal rights, the tendency to call upon the
state for the solution of all the problems of life shows how far we
have abandoned the doctrine of rights, with its correlative of
self-reliance, and have accepted the state as the reality of
society. It is this actual integration, rather than the theory, that
marks the twentieth century off from its predecessors.
One indication of how far the integration has gone is the
disappearance of any discussion of the state as statea
discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. the inadequacies of a particular regime, or
its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no
faultfinding with the institution itself. The state is all right, by
common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the "right"
people were at the helm. It does not occur to most critics of the
New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any state, under
anybody's guidance, or that when the political establishment garners
enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power
apparatus is indeed the enemy of society, that the interests of
these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it
is brought up, it is dismissed as "old-fashioned," which
it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the state bears
constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it.
A few illustrations of the temper of our times come to mind.
The oft-used statement that "we owe it to ourselves," in
relation to the debts incurred in the name of the state, is
indicative of the tendency to obliterate from our consciousness the
line of demarcation between governed and governors. It not only is a
stock phrase in economic textbooks, but is tacitly accepted in many
financial circles as sound in principle. To many modern bankers a
government bond is at least as sound as an obligation of a private
citizen, since the bond is in fact an obligation of the citizen to
pay taxes. Those bankers make no distinction between a debt backed
by production or productive ability and a debt secured by political
power; in the final analysis a government bond is a lien on
production, so what's the difference? By such reasoning, the
interests of the public, which are always centered in the production
of goods, are equated with the predatory interests of the state.
In many economics textbooks, government borrowing from citizens,
whether done openly or by pressure brought upon the banks to lend
their depositors' savings, is explained as a transaction equivalent
to the transfer of money from one pocket to another, of the same
pants; the citizen lends to himself what he lends to the
government. The rationale of this absurdity is that the effect on
the nation's economy is the same whether the citizen spends his
money or the government does it for him. He has simply given up his
negligible right of choice. The fact that he has not desire for what
the government spends his money on, that he would not of his own
free will contribute to the buying of it, is blithely overlooked.
The "same pants" notion rests on the identification of the
amorphous "national economy" with the well-being of the
individual; he is thus merged into the mass and loses his
personality.
Of a piece with this kind of thinking is a companion phrase, "We
are the government." Its use and acceptance are most
illustrative of the hold collectivism has taken on the American mind
in this century, to the exclusion of the basic American tradition.
When the Union was founded, the overriding fear of Americans was
that the new government might become a threat to their freedom, and
the framers of the Constitution were hard put to allay this fear.
Now it is held that freedom is a gift from government in return for
subservience. The reversal has been accomplished by a neat trick in
semantics. The word "democracy" is the key to this trick.
When one looks for a definition of this word, one finds that it is
not a clearly defined form of government but rather the rule by "social
attitudes." But, what is a "social attitude"? Putting
aside the wordy explanations of this slippery concept, it turns out
to be in practice good old majoritarianism; what fifty-one percent
of the people deem right is right, and the minority is perforce
wrong. It is the general-will fiction under a new name. There is no
place in this concept for the doctrine of inherent rights; the only
right left to the minority, even the minority of one, is conformity
with the dominant "social attitude."
If "we are the government," then it follows that the man
who finds himself in jail must blame himself for his plight, and the
man who takes all the tax deduction the law allows is really
cheating himself. While this may seem to be a farfetched reductio
ad absurdum, the fact is that many a conscript consoles himself
with that kind of logic. This country was largely populated by
escapees from conscriptioncalled "czarism" a
generation or two ago, and held to be the lowest form of involuntary
servitude. Now it has come to pass that a conscript army is in fact
a "democratic" army, composed of men who have made
adjustment with the "social attitude" of the times. So
does the run-of-the-mill draftee console himself when compelled to
interrupt his dream of a career. Acceptance of compulsory military
service has reached the point of unconscious resignation of
personality. The individual, as individual, simply does not exist;
he is of the mass.
This the fulfillment of statism. It is a state of mind that does
not recognize any ego but that of the collective. For analogy one
must go to the pagan practice of human sacrifice: when the gods
called for it, when the medicine man so insisted, as a condition for
prospering the clan, it was incumbent on the individual to throw
himself into the sacrificial fire. In point of fact, statism is a
form of paganism, for it is worship of an idol, something made of
man. Its base is pure dogma. Like all dogmas this one is subject to
interpretations and rationales, each with its coterie of devotees.
But, whether one calls himself a communist, socialist, New Dealer,
or just plain "democrat," each begins with the premise
that the individual is of consequence only as a servant of the
mass-idol. Its will be done.
There are stalwart souls, even in this twentieth century. There
are some who in the privacy of their personality hold that
collectivism is a denial of a higher order of things. There are
nonconformists who reject the Hegelian notion that "the state
incarnates the divine idea on earth." There are some who firmly
maintain that only man is made in the image of God. As this remnantthese
individualsgains understanding and improves its explanations,
the myth that happiness is to be found under collective authority
must fade away in the light of liberty.