Jacob Klein, My Hero: Freedom, Truth and the Liberal Arts
11:18 am in Classical Liberalism, Education, Freedom of Association, Liberal Arts, Private Property, Tolerance, Voluntaryism by Andrew Humphries
We recently came across the following anecdote about Jacob Klein, an eminent liberal artist and once dean of St. John’s College, at this blog:
During WWII the Navy considered seizing the campus of St. John’s via eminent domain in order to expand the Naval Academy. The fledgling New Program based on the great books of western tradition had just recently found a home there, on a campus whose oldest building was constructed before the Revolution, and with funding precarious, any move would probably kill this controversial endeavor outright.
A small delegation headed by Jascha Klein was sent to Washington to try to dissuade the government from seizing the campus. They entered the office of the Secretary of the Navy, who brusquely told them, “You have exactly one minute to tell me why I shouldn’t use your buildings to help the Academy in war time.”
Jascha Klein silently took out his pipe and began filling it with tobacco. He lit the pipe and checked to see if it was drawing well. Then, after 55 seconds had passed, this renowned scholar who had fled Hitler stood up and went to the door.
Turning, he said, “Because without what St. John’s stands for, this country is not worth defending against the Nazis.”
The Navy built the addition across the Severn River instead.
Of course, you cannot help but admire the magnanimity of Klein in this story: his capacity to be cool under fire, to think first, to have the courage to speak truth to power. These are clearly goals of the liberal artist and Klein’s skills in this matter were almost certainly whetted in the school of Socratic dialogue. (Incidentally, it is probably a good rule of dialogue that there be roughly 55 seconds of quiet contemplation for every 5 seconds of speaking.)
This anecdote illustrates, or at least pertains to, the two elements this blog contends are essential for unleashing the human potential. The first is liberty in which there is freedom for a competition of ideas, freedom to grow and discover, and freedom to search for the truth. The second is a firm commitment to the search for an understanding of what is good and true.
Liberty
One of the main issues at stake in this story is the government seeking to seize the property of the college to further its own war-making purposes.
Property is the means of undertaking action. Articles of property are the means of production, which individuals employ to pursue their goals. Respecting property is, therefore, tolerance. If individuals’ property can be taken arbitrarily by government, the freedom to plan and to act on the part of those individuals no longer exists. All goals, plans and actions become subsidiary to the ideas, plans and wishes of the state. There is no room for diversity of aims, no room for experimentation or objection to state activity.
In his work Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises, one of the greatest advocates of human liberty, described the role of private property thusly:
Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress are rooted.
Mises also recognizes that there is a strong tendency on the part of those “who control the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion” to “impose oppressive restraints on private property…and to refuse to respect or recognize any free sphere outside or beyond the dominion of the state.”
We cannot hope that those in charge of the government apparatus will voluntarily permit us spheres of activity free and separate from the goals of the state. Those in government must be restrained by a general public opinion that freedom is important, in other words, that individuals’ decision-making power over their own property—the means of pursuing their own goals—ought to be respected and remain free of the arbitrary interference of government. This is the meaning of tolerance. Only under this condition can social discovery and experimentation, alternate social arrangements and objectives “arise side by side with and in opposition to political power.”
(Of course, the very definition of fascism, including Nazism, is that all activities become subservient to the belligerent activities of the state. On this issue see Mussolini’s own definition and Sheldon Richmond’s.)
How wonderful that St. John’s was able to avoid the social homogenization and destruction caused by belligerent government.
Commitment to the search for truth
One of the reasons it is so easy to be enamored with the Klein story above is that it leaves open to interpretation what St. John’s is all about. If you like, it says “fill in what you like about St. John’s here.” This was probably wise on the part of Jacob Klein. Insofar as the story is true, it would mean that the Secretary of the Navy could fill in his own meaning, do his own thinking and research about why St. John’s and the kind of activity that goes on there is valuable. The Secretary was clearly not in a receptive place and it would be almost impossible to have said anything significant about the liberal arts without creating a controversy that would have been insurmountable in only a minute. But Klein’s comment was ideal to turn the Secretary’s “smug ease” into a “need to know,” which is the essential characteristic of Socratic teaching. (See the chapter “The Nature of Socratic Learning” in Peter Abbs’ The Educational Imperative.)
We cannot know definitively what Klein believed “St. John’s stands for” (although, his several lectures and essays make some excellent statements about St. John’s and the liberal arts). Different people have different ideas about what makes St. John’s valuable. All the parties in an organization cannot have exactly the same ends, but just as in market exchange where diverse goals are coordinated and mutually advanced by exchange, dialogical exchange is complementary and mutually supportive of many diverse understandings and objectives. This, in fact, is what I believe makes St. John’s valuable.
In my opinion, there are two basic things St. John’s implicitly “stands for.”
Firstly, St. John’s commitment to dialogical inquiry requires a commitment to peaceful sharing of diverse understanding and the humility to realize that we have something to learn from others who are different from ourselves. Secondly, St. John’s stands for the faith that “knowledge is possible, that truth is attainable, and that it is always [our] business to seek it” (Buchanan).
Freedom is necessary to find out the good and to do it. Freedom is necessary for learning and action, but it is not sufficient. Also needed is the genuine desire to search out truth and what is good.
Jacob Klein’s works and anecdotes about him like this one are inspirational to me. When I read them, I cannot help but want to emulate him. I admire his penetrating understanding, the clarity of his thought and writing, his assiduity in the liberal arts, and his erudition. Klein’s example compels me to want to be better, to not settle for a poor and partial understanding but to constantly search for greater understanding and self-mastery. I speak earnestly when I say that Jacob Klein is one of my all time heroes.
