Can Capitalism Survive?

By Benjamin A. Rogge

One of the signs of advancing age in the American college professor is a tendency for him to write less and publish more. This seeming paradox is easily explained by the phenomenon of
Collected Works, that is, by what on television would be described as reruns. As in television, no great public outcry is needed to bring forth the reruns; a question from his wife, a polite suggestion from a colleague, and the cut-and-paste operation is under way.I have put together here what I believe to be the best of the rather meager output of my professional career up to this point. For reasons (mostly financial) that always seemed adequate at the moment, I have been more of a speechmaker than a writer. Thus, you will find that many of the pieces in this collection are but speeches put down on paper…. [From the Foreword]

Book Cover

First Pub. Date

1979

Publisher

Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc. Liberty Fund, Inc.

Pub. Date

1979

Comments

Collected essays.

Copyright

The text of this edition is under copyright. Picture of Benjamin Rogge: file photo, courtesy of Liberty Fund, Inc.

Part II, Chapter 3

Who’s To Blame?

In some 63.7 percent of all interviews in my office, the person across the desk is there to tell me who’s to blame. And in 99.6 percent of the cases where that is the question, the answer is the same:
He isn’t.Now if these were just simple cases of prevarication, we could all shake our heads at the loss of the old Yes-father-I-chopped-down-the-cherry-tree spirit and turn to some other problem, such as the danger presented to the stability of the earth by the buildup of snow on the polar icecaps. But the denial of responsibility is rarely that simple, and herein lies the story.Today’s George Washington, on the campus and elsewhere, says, “Yes, I chopped down the cherry tree,
but—” and then comes ten to ninety minutes of explanation, which is apparently supposed to end in my breaking into tears and forgiving all, after which he goes home to sharpen his little hatchet.The little Georges of today say, “Yes, I chopped down the cherry tree, but let me give you the
whole story. All the guys over at the house were telling me that it’s a tradition around here to cut down cherry trees. What’s that? Did any of
them ever actually cut down any cherry trees? Well, I don’t know, but anyway there’s this tradition, see, and with all this lack of school spirit, I figured I was really doing the school a favor when I cut down that crummy old tree.” [
Lights up, center stage, where our hero is receiving a medal from the president of the Student Council as the band plays the school song.]Or it may run like this: “Now this professor, see, told us to collect some forest specimens; he may have told us what trees to cut, but, frankly, I just can’t understand half of what he says, and I honestly thought he said cherry tree. Now actually I wasn’t in class the day he gave the assignment and this friend of mine took it down and I can’t help it if he made a mistake can I? Anyway, if the callboy had awakened me on time, I’d have made the class and would have known he said to get leaves from a whortleberry bush.”

Society on Trial

So far we have run through the simpler cases. Now let’s move to more complex ones. In this one, little George says to his father, “Yes, Dad, I cut down the cherry tree, but I just couldn’t help it. You and mother are always away from home and when you are home all you do is tell me to get out of the house, to go practice throwing a dollar across the Rappahannock. I guess I cut down the tree to get you to pay a little attention to me, and you can’t blame me for that, can you?” [
Lights up, center stage, revealing the kindly old judge admonishing the parents to show more love and affection to little George, who is seated right, quietly hacking away at the jury box.]These can get messy. Here’s another. In this one, young George has hired himself a slick city lawyer who has read all the recent books on the sociology of crime. The lawyer pleads G.W.’s case as follows: “It is true that this young man cut down the tree, marked exhibit A and lying there on the first ten rows of the courtroom seats. Also, there can be no question but that he did it willfully and maliciously, nor can it be denied that he has leveled over half the cherry trees in northern Virginia in exactly the same way. But is this boy to blame? Can he be held responsible for his actions? No. The real crime is his society’s, and not his. He is the product of his environment, the victim of a social system which breeds crime in every form. Born in poverty, raised in the slums, abused by his parents,” and on and on. The lawyer closes by pointing a finger at me and saying dramatically, “You, Dean Rogge, as a member of the society which has produced this young monster, are as much to blame as he, as much deserving of punishment as he.” The boy gets off with a six-month suspended sentence and I am ridden out of town on a rail.I do want to refer to just one other possibility. In this one, the lawyer calls as a witness an eminent psychoanalyst who, as a result of his examination of the young man, absolves him of all conscious responsibility for the crime, in testimony that is filled with the jargon of that semi-science—hence obscure, hence somewhat pornographic. It turns out that the cherry tree is a phallic symbol and the boy’s action an unconscious and perverse response to the universal castration complex.Farfetched? Not at all. As Richard LaPiere writes in his book,
The Freudian Ethic:

The Freudian explanation of crime absolves the individual from all personal responsibility for the criminal act and places the blame squarely upon the shoulders of an abstraction—society. Modern society is especially hard upon the individual, since it imposes upon him so many and often contradictory restraints and at the same time demands of him so much that does not come naturally to him. His criminal acts are therefore but a symptom of the underlying pathology of society, and it is as futile to punish him for the sins of society as to attempt to cure acne by medicating the symptomatic pustules.
*16

Responsibility Is Personal

Where does all this leave us? Who’s to blame? Well, nobody, or rather everybody. The Freudian ethic has eliminated sin (and, of course, that means that it has eliminated virtue as well).Personally, I can’t buy it. I cannot accept a view of man which makes him a helpless pawn of either his id or his society. I do not deny that the mind of each of us is a dark and complex chamber, nor that the individual is bent by his environment, nor even the potentially baneful influence of parents. As a matter of fact, after a few months in the dean’s office, I was ready to recommend to the college that henceforth it admit only orphans. But as a stubborn act of faith I insist that precisely what makes man man is his potential ability to conquer both himself and his environment. If this capacity is indeed given to or possessed by each of us, then it follows that we are inevitably and terribly and forever responsible for everything that we do. The answer to the question, “Who’s to blame?” is always, “Mea Culpa, I am.”This is a tough philosophy. The Christian can take hope in the thought that though his sins can never be excused, he may still come under the grace of God, sinner though he be. The non-Christian has to find some other source of strength, and believe me, this is not easy to do.What does all this have to do with our day-to-day living, whether on or beyond the campus? Actually, it has everything to do with it. It means that as students we stop blaming our teachers, our classmates, our parents, our high schools, our society, and even the callboy for our own mistakes and shortcomings. It means that as teachers and college administrators we stop blaming our students, the board of trustees, the oppressive spirit of society (and even our wives) for our own failures.As individuals it means that we stop making excuses to ourselves, that we carry each cherry tree we cut down on our consciences forever. It means that we say with Cassius, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.” This is a tough philosophy, but it is also the only hopeful one man has yet devised.

16.

Richard La Piere,
The Freudian Ethic (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1959) p. 166.

17.

Mark Holloway,
Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880, 2d ed. (New York: Peter Smith, 1966), p. 101.

18.

John Humphrey Noyes,
History of American Socialisms (1870), p. 43.

19.

Ibid., pp. 54-55.

Part III

Categories: Benjamin Rogge