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August 11, 2009

Do Not Adjust Your TV Set...

"Have you seen our copy of Ghosts on the Roof by Whittaker Chambers?"

"Isn't it in that bookcase that you are looking at?"

"No."

"Perhaps in another bookcase... or your office... or Laura Tyson's office over which

you have taken seisin... or in one of the boxes of books in the trunk of the blue car?"

Books will never replace the internet until they come with RFID tags so that their

location can be pinged...

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I am having a hard time understanding this. Sam Tanenhaus writes:

Conservatism Is Dead: The realist [Whittaker] Chambers... clung to the

Beaconsfield position. He supported the Eisenhower administration's

negotiations with the Soviets, defended civil liberties, praised the writings of

John Kenneth Galbraith...

And I have no idea what he is talking about.

On page 506 of Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers, he writes that:

Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth

Galbraith's The Affluent Society...

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Galbraith's The Affluent Society...

But "stimulation" is not praise. And the only note Tanenhaus gives to support

"stimulation" is a reference to Chambers's 1959 National Review article "Foot in the

Door" (reprinted in Ghosts on the Roof). In that article Chambers attacks the the

claims of the education lobby that:

Willie... is fated to go forever un-higher-educated. For--a Delphic voice warns

us--by 1984... secondary school graduates will be besieging the gates of

campuses, quite futilely, since college facilities will be totally inadequate.... It

takes no great wits to guess what we are supposed to do next: shake out what is

left of our lank wallets while we pressure our legislators... to syphon federal

taxes into higher education... tax-ravaged and inflated dollars fed into academic

tills by other-directed and coercive means...

Besides, Chambers goes on to say, publicly-supported higher education is the

vanguard of totalitarianism itelf:

[L]et us not delude ourselves.... [T]his is the Total State that is dawning... under

various softening and dissembling names and forms, on various impressive

pretexts or necessities...

And then comes the only reference to Galbraith:

Perhaps, of necessity the State must soon be into the Business of Education, as

the witty and bracingly arrogant Professor J.K. Galbraith assured us, only the

other day, that it must. But must it?..."

After that passage, Chambers is off and running with his argument that TV will

come to dominate higher education. Three pages later Chambers pauses to

summarize:

I am not suggesting... televised education can replace... Harvard.... I am not

suggesting... televised education is... a cure-all.... I am only saying that the need

is great... television [is] a means to meet the need... that it is comparatively

inexpensive and need not involve the State.... One of the beneficent side-effects

of the crisis of the twentieth century... is a dawning realization, not so much

that the mass of mankind is degradingly poor, as that there will be no peace for

the islands of prosperity until the continents of proliferating poverty have been

lifted to something like the general material level of the islanders.... Unless the

general level of mind is raised at the same time as the level of material well-

being... we shall all risk resembling those savages... [with] top hats and tight

shoes... leaving unredeemed the loin-cloth of their middle zones...

And Tanenhaus parses this in his "Galbraith" paragraph so:

Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth

Galbraith's The Affluent Society. "There will be no peace for the islands of

relative plenty," Chambers wrote in NR, "until the continents of proliferating

poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the

islanders." This, though Chambers did not say it, had been the summary

objective of the New Deal...

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objective of the New Deal...

In context, Chambers's hopes that TV can educate the degradingly poor mass of

mankind in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America sounds nothing at all

like "the summary objective of the New Deal."

In his Whittaker Chambers Tanenhaus had merely taken Chambers's description of

Galbraith as "witty and bracingly arrogant" and turned it into "Chambers was

stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent

Society..."

But by 2007, Tanenhaus's "stimulated by... heresies of JKG" has become

"refashioned himself into a liberal... a defender of... the Keynesian policies promoted

by JKG".

And we are still there today, with Tanenhaus claiming that Chambers "praised the

writings of JKG..." with no support that I see other than an article in which

Chambers says that the "witty and bracingly arrogant" JKG's arguments for federal

aid to education are "the Total State... under various softening and dissembling

names and forms, on various impressive pretexts or necessities..."

Is Tanenhaus referring to something other than "Foot in the Door" when he talks of

Chambers praising the writings of JKG? If so, I cannot imagine what.

And National Review's archives have disappeared, or been disappeared:

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8/19/09 12:40 PMDo Not Adjust Your TV Set...

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Me: Economists:Juicebox

Mafia:

Moral

Philosophers:

Brad DeLong on August 11, 2009 at 05:17 PM in Economics, Economics: Education,

History, Philosophy: Moral, Politics, Utter Stupidity | Permalink

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i must admit, whittaker chambers has always just been a name to me, a player in an affair that

look place before my birth, and i have never read anything by him.

and now that i have, i will never read another syllable. this is the great whittaker chambers?

he's not even an interesting prose stylist, for god's sake: people who couldn't get published in

the spectator in 1959 wrote better than this.

and terry teachout spent some amount of his limited time on this planet assembling this? i

knew teachout when he was a pleasant young music critic at the kansas city star 30 years ago:

whatever happened to him?

Posted by: howard | August 13, 2009 at 12:23 AM

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