Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

[halbowden]

http://mises.org/story/910

Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard

Originally appeared in Left and Right, Spring 1965, pp. 4-22.

...

For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set about the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are. Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne's stirring words serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty:

youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established-Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . .

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering, just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic... It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail...

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress--one might say, the only lever of progress...

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate--a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience. To keep one's reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. [21]

[21] Randolph Bourne, "Youth," The Atlantic Monthly (April, 1912); reprinted in Lillian Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1965), pp. 9-11, 15.

[Barbara Branden]

Rand said, "To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started."

Barbara

[BaalChatzaf]

Rand said, "To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started."

Barbara

Unchanging youth is when one dies young.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Reidy]

This fits in with what von Mises (in Bureaucracy) and Goldberg (in Liberal Fascism) have to say about modern statists' preoccupation with youth and their preference for emotional connotation over sober intellection, from JJ Rousseau in the 18th century to Obama today.

A quick googling of "Randoph Bourne" suggests that he was an early-20th-century Progressive and not a libertarian at all. The dating of the quote handsomely bears out Goldberg's observation that, while fascism originated intellectually in Europe, it first came into political flower in Woodrow Wilson's America. Rothbard's sentiments may have been a testable hypothesis in 1965, but the prediction has failed the test of time.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Rand said, "To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started."

Barbara

Unchanging youth is when one dies young.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Bob,

How about holding it? Can you hold it if you're dead?

(btw - Most all of Rand's stuff has volition at the root. That's one of her fundamental contexts and one should keep it in mind when reading her. No life, no volition. Ignoring that is like trying to understand your writing and leaving out the fact that you are Jewish. )

Michael

[halbowden]

Oh dear, oh dear. It appears I made a wrong turn back around Albuquerque. My sincerest apologies.

I will carry on with my search through the forest dark, alone. It is strange though, what I started looking for grows paler, colder in my mind. I fear soon I will forget its feel and form entirely. It fades like a dream, or a kindling-fire with no fuel. You see, I fled from a soft-soiled swamp with this fire in my mind. I ran to the forest searching for a more solid ground. I wanted to see something beyond the stale look cast upon the elders, something to help me know the fire I bore was real, not as some strange, twisting knife crafted well before my mind's eye.

The Boy on the Bicycle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Hal,

Are you young?

If so, and if the boy on the bicycle is your motor right now, may I suggest you do as the boy on the bicycle did? Look at what people do to admire, not at how they react to you, especially if they start bantering out of good vibes. Not even if they disagree with you.

Banter is not dismissal. It is actually a good thing in trying to cast off "needless and debilitating pessimism." So is intelligent disagreement.

Nietzsche, in speaking about man with a fundamentally pro-life attitude in Ecco Homo ("Why I Am So Wise"), wrote:

... what does not kill him makes him stronger.

Michael