To the editors.
It must be admitted that Marxists do respect the power of ideas. This is why they generally use every means at their disposal to make sure that no ideas except their own are allowed currency. In the late Soviet Empire, this was rather simple. Stalin not only shot everyone who had the wrong ideas, but also everyone who might at some future time have the wrong idea. In the Western democracies, however, things are less easy. It usually becomes necessary to completely debase the language to make alternative concepts unpronounceable.
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Mr. Lipsitz’s effort in this project is his reformulation of all brands of anticollectivist thought into one single human trait: avarice. This is the single and overriding motivation of everyone who disagrees with the party line. Nobody ever opposed socialism because they saw the misery it plunged Eastern Europe into. No one supports capitalism because it creates wealth from thought and brings the benefits of human labor and ingenuity to the widest possible distribution. Nope, they only resist the tide of history because they’re greedy. How then to explain the success of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, Walesa, Havel, Yeltsin and Kohl? According to Lipsitz, the neoconservatives have x-rayed the puny mind of the proles and found the perfect combination of hatred and envy to brainwash the cretins.
Michael P. Walsh
I am pleased that my article provoked such energetic responses from Thomas F. Mitchell, Jordan Kassof, and Michael P. Walsh. All three understand very well that ideas matter, that questions of culture are also questions of politics, and that all of us must participate in serious and sustained dialogue about educational issues. Yet in different ways, all three letters demonstrate why it is essential to develop new approaches to these issues. Faced with shifting paradigms in an era of cultural confusion, they resort to paternalistic and authoritarian affirmations of certainty. They respond to the opportunities for an expanded and open dialogue by merely reciting the rules of the game, even though no one else may have agreed to play on their terms.
Walsh assumes that my opposition to corporate and neoconservative control over American universities means that I must support Stalinist “socialist” tyrannies in Europe. But his trusting optimism about the benign intentions of those in power, his support for policies that restrict access to higher education, and his portrayal of neoconservative absolutists as pluralists give Walsh more in common with the dislodged party bureaucrats in Eastern Europe than with the genuinely heroic rebels whose moral capital he so facilely appropriates for himself.
