Seven Questions for Professor Jaffa

• Publication year: 1987
• Citation: Vol. 10 No. 03

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 10, No. 3SPRING 1987

Seven Questions for Professor Jaffa(fn**)

George Anastaplo(fn*)

We must not expect that liberal education can ever become universal education. It will always remain the obligation and the privilege of a minority. Nor can we expect that the liberally educated will become a political power in their own right. For we cannot expect that liberal education will lead all who benefit from it to understand their civic responsibility in the same way or to agree politically. Karl Marx, the father of communism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the stepgrandfather of fascism, were liberally educated on a level to which we cannot even hope to aspire. But perhaps one can say that their grandiose failures make it easier for us who have experienced those failures to understand again the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism. Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics. Thus it may again become true that all liberally educated men will be politically moderate men. It is in this way that the liberally educated may again receive a hearing even in the market place.

- Leo Strauss(fn1)

Prologue

The reader who has had the privilege of studying the essays by Harry V. Jaffa collected in this issue of the University of Puget Sound Law Review should be able to appreciate what has long been evident about the work of a scholar whose considerable learning is surpassed only by his dedicated passion.(fn2) It should be evident as well why Professor Jaffa has been able to enlist as he has, for some years now, so many talented young people for an unrelenting crusade to save our country from the deadly follies of liberals and conservatives alike.

My longstanding assessment of Mr. Jaffa's work is indicated in the Introduction I made of him for a "Conversation" at Rosary College on December 4, 1980.(fn3) That Introduction and the interesting colloquy which followed have been published by Mr. Jaffa in his most recent book.(fn4) My 1980 Introduction of him went something like this:

It is my privilege to introduce on this occasion a friend of a quarter century and a distinguished political scientist, Harry V. Jaffa, of Claremont Men's College and Claremont Graduate School. Professor Jaffa, whose appearance at Rosary College has been made possible by the support of him by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is available this afternoon for an extended conversation with us about matters ancient and modern.

Mr. Jaffa is, to my mind, the most instructive political scientist writing in this country today. The things he writes about range from Socrates and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and William Shakespeare, from the Founding Fathers to Abraham Lincoln, from Tom Sawyer and Winston Churchill to contemporary politics and the joys of cycling.

I am reminded, when I encounter Mr. Jaffa, of another provocatively influential American, a great woman who died only this past weekend, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement (whom I was privileged to see close-up only once). It was true of Miss Day, as it is true of Mr. Jaffa, that it was virtually impossible for her not to be interesting about whatever she wrote. Intelligence, hard work, and a gift for language no doubt contribute to this capacity to invest every discourse with significance. But fundamental to such influence is a certain integrity, even a single-minded moral fervor. Thus, it could be said of Miss Day in her obituary in the New York Times on Monday of this week that she had sought "to work so as to bring about the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good." Much the same can be said about Mr. Jaffa. Indeed, Miss Day, in the way she lived her life, in an unrelenting effort to better the lives of the downtrodden, could be said to have put into practice the much-quoted proposition by Mr. Jaffa which was used by Senator Goldwater in his Acceptance Speech upon being nominated for the Presidency by the Republican Party in 1964, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

A little more should be said by me about Mr. Jaffa now, if only to suggest matters that we might want to talk about on this occasion. A few differences between us, of which I was reminded when I heard him speak yesterday at Loyola University, could usefully be indicated.

Mr. Jaffa not only makes far more of exercising than I do-I limit myself to walking whenever possible and to the avoidance of elevators for ascents or descents of less than five floors-but he also is a much more vigorous moralist than I am, both in regulating his own conduct and in judging the conduct of others. I believe that I allow more than he does for good-intentioned errors, for inefficiency on the part of people, and for circumstances which account for, sometimes even justify, what seem from the outside to be moral aberrations. Compassion can be almost as important as moral indignation in these matters, particularly with respect to domestic relations, whether the subjects be abortion, divorce, or homosexuality. Perhaps also I make more than he does of the importance-if only out of respect for the sensibilities of others and for the moral tone of the community-of discretion, if not even of good-natured hypocrisy.

We differ as well with respect to the conduct of foreign relations. We do share an abhorrence of tyranny, whether of the Right or of the Left. But we sometimes part company on assessments of how constitutional government and American republicanism can best be defended abroad. Thus, he was much more hopeful than I could ever be that our involvement in the Vietnam War (however noble in intention that might have been, and that it surely was, in some respects)-he was much more hopeful than I was that our Vietnam involvement could do the American or the Indo-Chinese people some good. Today we differ as to precisely what kind of a threat the Russians pose to us. I see them as much more vulnerable (both politically and militarily) than does he: and I consider all too many calculations about nuclear-war "scenarios" to depend too much on game theories and not enough on political judgment. I believe, for example, that Russian leaders are much more constrained by domestic public opinion (by a pacific, even though patriotic, public opinion) and by other factors than many of us recognize. They have suffered, at home and abroad, a considerable setback in Afghanistan; we can only hope that they, and we, do not suffer an even greater setback by a Russian invasion of Poland. But whatever happens in Poland, it is now evident that the cause of freedom is bound to be in better shape in Eastern Europe than it has been since the Second World War-in part because of what Polish workers have done in showing the world how things really stand there. The only question may be what price the Polish people will have to pay, and this may depend, in part, on their prudence and on ours.

Perhaps at the heart of the differences between Mr. Jaffa and me-whether the differences be as to the status of exercise or as to assessments of the Russians-is with respect to how much one should be concerned with the preservation of one's life. An immoderate cherishing of what happens to be one's own can lead, it seems to me, to psychic paralysis or to undue combativeness: either can undermine that relaxed competence which makes healthy statesmanship more likely. Certainly, Mr. Jaffa responds much more than I do to the apocalyptic as against the comic and somewhat less than I do to "liberty" as against "equality." Obviously, we touch here on questions about the nature of human existence, of virtue, and of happiness.

On the other hand, at the heart of our deep affinities- besides the fact that we were both fortunate enough to share a great teacher in Leo Strauss-is our minority belief that fundamental to sensible political science and to a decent life as a community is a general respect for natural right and what is known as natural law. This means, among other things, that discrimination based on arbitrary racial categories cannot be defended, especially by a people dedicated to the self-evident truth that "all men are created equal." It also means that the family as an institution should be supported.

I mention in passing that we do differ with respect to the Equal Rights Amendment-but here I believe that Mr. Jaffa, even though he puts what he says in terms of nature in his opposition to that amendment, has allowed himself to be unduly influenced by the antics and "principles" of a minority of the proponents of that largely symbolic grace note for our Constitution.

Be all this as it may, an informed study of nature in human things is perhaps the most pressing demand in education today-and for this Mr. Jaffa, with his profound grasp of the classical writers, of Shakespeare's thought, and of the career of Abraham Lincoln, is an invaluable guide.

Permit me to close these introductory remarks by returning to...