In the wake of the scandal of the NSA, several points need to be highlighted. In the first place, let all attacks cease forevermore on those of us who hold what has been universally smeared as the “conspiracy theory of history”: I. e., on those of us who believe in the laws of cause and effect, who believe that men do not act purposelessly and without motive, and who believe in using our intellects to trace connections and frame hypotheses in analyzing the world and not merely to record officially proclaimed events.
World War II has been aptly termed the Liberals’ War. More than that, it was the Old Left’s War, in which the entire Liberal spectrum, from proto-ADA types grouped in the Union for Democratic Action on the Right to the Communist Party on the Left, happily banded together to take their fighting places in the serried ranks of U. S. imperialism
For two years we have been instructed by the radical opposition at Berkeley on the evils of the swollen and gigantic multiversity that constitutes the University of California: the vast bureaucracy, the impersonality, the emphasis on quantity, the use of the multiversity to process swelling numbers of students into the military-industrial complex. All these stem from two root causes: the burgeoning of mass, indeed almost universal, education, and the development of governmental colleges. If the government educates, it is bound to educate for goals and indoctrinate in values.
Among the activist organizations of the New Left, two and only two have had a direct impact on American life: SNCC And SDS (the Berkeley phenomenon has been important, but has not been contained in anyone organization.) SNCC, founded in 1960, was the first, and its militance, direct action, and spirit of participatory democracy provided the inspiration for the now far larger Students for a Democratic Soclety founded two years later.
There he stood, his tie askew, his balding head disheveled, the ashes from his beloved pipe flying all around, his intelligent and merry eyes twinkling as he scored some outrageous, logical, and beautifully penetrating point to some clod who couldn’t tell the difference between the host of cardboard “individualists” and this one genuine article.
John Lukacs indicates that the roots of the Cold War are to be found in the beginnings of World War II. Lukacs analyzes how Pearl Harbor resulted from the policy decisions of particular forces in the governments of Washington and Tokyo.
Philosophy has fathered a number of other sciences. It is, as we all know, the father of physics which used to be known as natural philosophy. And no one is ignorant of the fact that economics was launched by a moralist whose name was Adam Smith. Nor should this be really surprising when we reflect on the fact that the most general notions in all these sciences are basically philosophical and that the methods of unfolding their implications are basically philosophical.
