My travels in Western North Carolina Tuesday precluded the preparation of a new Daily Journal. So I went back in the archives and found this travel-themed piece from August 2003. Can’t you tell by the reference to audiotape?
RALEIGH — A thought occurred to me earlier this week as I was traveling in and around the Triad region of North Carolina. The notion didn’t have to do with my location but was instead prompted by the audiotape I was listening to on the way.
It was one of Knowledge Products’ excellent series of tapes on the world’s political hot spots. Part history, part current affairs, these productions are an excellent introduction to unfamiliar places and people and a good refresher course on more familiar subject matter. On this particular day, I was listening to a history of Germany, with a script by the celebrated libertarian historian Ralph Raico.
What got me to thinking was the rise of totalitarianism in Germany. It didn’t start with the Nazis in the 1920s. The seeds were planted decades before, in London of all places. There, German expatriates Marx and Engels gave the European socialist movements of the 19th Century a harder and more revolutionary edge with their publication of The Communist Manifesto and other works. The spread of Marxism prompted a reaction from some threatened elites and intellectuals, such as those in the German Historical School of the social sciences, who tried to articulate a “Third Way” between communism and liberal capitalism. Their efforts resulted in Bismarck’s welfare state and copycat quasi-socialist legislation in France, Britain, Scandanavia, even South America. (American populism and progressivism at the turn of the century were relatively moderate reflections of this worldwide revolution in ideas; it took war and depression to pave the way for true social-democrat legislation in the U.S.)
Later, post-WWI socialists such as Mussolini and Hitler married their totalitarian economics with national (Italy) or racial (Germany) appeals to create fascism. Both Marxism and fascism were successfully exported from Europe into the Third World, where regimes as disparate as Peron in Argentina, the strong-man states of liberated Africa, the Red Chinese, and the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia all adapted these ideologies to their own countries and their own nefarious ends.
What’s my point? These regimes weren’t simply glorified kleptocracies. They weren’t just new versions of the old-style despotisms of hereditary kings and khans that had ruled over most of the globe for most of human history. These were ideological states where millions of people were persuaded to embrace and act on ideas that were, at their heart, evil.
The results were destitution, destruction, and death. Much death. Tens of millions of deaths — of civilians by the instigation of their leaders, not counting deaths of combatants in wartime.
I say all of this to make a point about ideas. Conservatives like to quote Richard Weaver’s observation that “ideas have consequences.” Modern-day liberals like to dismiss controversies about all sorts of educational issues, such as the recent freshman-reading flaps at UNC-Chapel Hill and other campuses, by asking what could be wrong with exposing students to “new ideas.”
Ironically, this sentiment reflects a lack of respect for the power of ideas. That power can be used for good or for evil, the latter too often predominating. The problem with “exposing” students to new ideas is that mere exposure is insufficient. It can even be dangerous. To take ideas seriously in an academic context should be to examine them thoroughly, to seek real understanding by considering alternative explanations and competing points of view. Provocation is not the goal. Mere familiarity is not the goal. During much of the 20th century, elites from around the world sent their children to Paris to study at “universities” that consisted of little more than indoctrination factories for the fashionable socialist ideologies of the day. These students learned, all right. They learned just enough of this rot to go home and try it out on their subjects, many of whom suffered and starved and died.
By all means, students should study influential ideas. They should study evil ideas. I would have welcomed a freshman-reading assignment at UNC, for example, that consisted of reading The Communist Manifesto as well as selections from Thomas Sowell’s masterful critique, Marxism. With these relatively brief works under their belts, students would have had an excellent basis for discussion.
This would have been a case of taking ideas seriously. And seriousness is what they deserve. Never let anyone suggest that a book can’t be dangerous. Millions of ghosts would beg to differ.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.