friends are now involved in a love affair with the New Left, such as writing for Ramparts magazine and lecturing at the Free University in New York. In some ways this makes sense. The New Left and the libertarians share a common suspicion of concentrated power, and particularly of the power to coerce; they join in not wishing to be ruled by any establishment, even of the elite. But there the love affair comes to an abrupt end.
To the libertarian, private property is an extension of the human personality and an absolutely necessary element in the structure of a society of free men; to the New Lefter, private property is largely an invention of the establishment to suppress the free human spirit and is a barrier to the full expression of human concern and relatedness. To the libertarian, or at least to Ben Rogge, the “politics of confrontation” is neither peaceful as a means nor acceptable as an end, if the end is what it so often seems to be, the imposing of a minority view on the majority by what amounts to blackmail. “Give in to my demands and I’ll leave your office; throw me off your property and you are guilty of breaking the peace. Call in the cops to protect that which is yours and you are a fascist.” To the libertarian this is nonsense and very dangerous nonsense indeed. The goal of the victory of persuasion over force in human affairs can hardly be well served by what amounts to the use of force.
But of course the goal of the New Left is not the goal of the libertarian—the right choice of means. In fact the goals of the New Left are difficult to identify, particularly in terms of the kind of social arrangements they wish to see brought into being out of the ashes of that which we now have. There seem to be three main possibilities: (1) an essentially anarchist arrangement, with no government; (2) a syndicalist-communalist arrangement, with minimal government; or (3) an out-and-out Marxist-socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. To the libertarian, the first would soon become the tyranny of the strong, and life would indeed be mean, nasty, brutish and short; the second would mean economic chaos and starvation for most; the third would mean tyranny, bold and bloody and bright.
To all of these—the conservative, the modern liberal, and the New Left—the libertarian says, with Huckleberry Finn, “No thank you, I have been there before.” He insists that what marks the civilized society is not so much what goals its people are seeking as what means are used and accepted in the seeking of goals. He insists that to the opinions and ideas and revelations of even the best of men must still cling the mortal, the human uncertainty. If even those who come to be least imperfect in knowing and acting cannot be identified in advance (or even clearly identified after the fact), surely it follows that each imperfect man must be given (indeed, has) the right to follow his own imperfectly selected star in his own imperfect way, to march to the music that he hears and not to the music that you and I hear.
The libertarian is in no sense a utopian. He argues only that in a world in which each individual, imperfect man was left free to make his own imperfect decisions and to act on them in any way that is peaceful, enjoying the fruits of his successes and suffering the agony of his mistakes, man could at least fully attain to the dignity and tragedy and comedy that comes with being a man. And here, somewhere east of Eden, there is little more that we can expect out of life.
In some 63.7 percent of all interviews in my office, the person across the desk is there to tell me who’s to blame. And in 99.6 percent of the cases where that is the question, the answer is the same: He isn’t.
Now if these were just simple cases of prevarication, we could all shake our heads at the loss of the old Yes-father-I-chopped-down-the-cherry-tree spirit and turn to some other problem, such as the danger presented to the stability of the earth by the buildup of snow on the polar icecaps. But the denial of responsibility is rarely that simple, and herein lies the story.
Today’s George Washington, on the campus and elsewhere, says, “Yes, I chopped down the cherry tree, but—” and then comes ten to ninety minutes of explanation, which is apparently supposed to end in my breaking into tears and forgiving all, after which he goes home to sharpen his little hatchet.
The little Georges of today say, “Yes, I chopped down the cherry tree, but let me give you the whole story. All the guys over at the house were telling me that it’s a tradition around here to cut down cherry trees. What’s that? Did any of them ever actually cut down any cherry trees? Well, I don’t know, but anyway there’s this tradition, see, and with all this lack of school spirit, I figured I was really doing the school a favor when I cut down that crummy old tree.” [Lights up, center stage, where our hero is receiving a medal from the president of the Student Council as the band plays the school song.]
Or it may run like this: “Now this professor, see, told us to collect some forest specimens; he may have told us what trees to cut, but, frankly, I just can’t understand half of what he says, and I honestly thought he said cherry tree. Now actually I wasn’t in class the day he gave the assignment and this friend of mine took it down and I can’t help it if he made a mistake can I? Anyway, if the callboy had awakened me on time, I’d have made the class and would have known he said to get leaves from a whortleberry bush.”
So far we have run through the simpler cases. Now let’s move to more complex ones. In this one, little George says to his father, “Yes, Dad, I cut down the cherry tree, but I just couldn’t help it. You and mother are always away from home and when you are home all you do is tell me to get out of the house, to go practice throwing a dollar across the Rappahannock. I guess I cut down the tree to get you to pay a little attention to me, and you can’t blame me for that, can you?” [Lights up, center stage, revealing the kindly old judge admonishing the parents to show more love and affection to little George, who is seated right, quietly hacking away at the jury box.]
These can get messy. Here’s another. In this one, young George has hired himself a slick city lawyer who has read all the recent books on the sociology of crime. The lawyer pleads G.W.’s case as follows: “It is true that this young man cut down the tree, marked exhibit A and lying there on the first ten rows of the courtroom seats. Also, there can be no question but that he did it willfully and maliciously, nor can it be denied that he has leveled over half the cherry trees in northern Virginia in exactly the same way. But is this boy to blame? Can he be held responsible for his actions? No. The real crime is his society’s, and not his. He is the product of his environment, the victim of a social system which breeds crime in every form. Born in poverty, raised in the slums, abused by his parents,” and on and on. The lawyer closes by pointing a finger at me and saying dramatically, “You, Dean Rogge, as a member of the society which has produced this young monster, are as much to blame as he, as much deserving of punishment as he.” The boy gets off with a six-month suspended sentence and I am ridden out of town on a rail.
I do want to refer to just one other possibility. In this one, the lawyer calls as a witness an eminent psychoanalyst who, as a result of his examination of the young man, absolves him of all conscious responsibility for the crime, in testimony that is filled with the jargon of that semi-science—hence obscure, hence somewhat pornographic. It turns out that the cherry tree is a phallic symbol and the boy’s action an unconscious and perverse response to the universal castration complex.
Farfetched? Not at all. As Richard LaPiere writes in his book, The Freudian Ethic:
The Freudian explanation of crime absolves the individual from all personal responsibility for the criminal act and places the blame
