Like some men new to the movement, I was more passion than knowledge, well intended but green.

I stumbled into Rod Van Mechelen’s old Backlash forum, read a handful of posts there and promptly posted my ideas about why no one in that forum really knew men’s issues, but that of course, I did.

Some guy stepped out of the shadows there, dismantled everything I said with the skill and dispassion of an experienced surgeon, as though he were writing a grocery list or performing some other mundane task while he was eviscerating me and exposing my ignorance.

Then he invited me to “go piss up a rope.”

Many of you know that man today as Zed. And though he has been known by other names, his writings have taken him to iconic status in the minds of many men who have been at this for a while, this writer included.  This has happened despite the fact that he has eschewed the path of self promotion and opted to speak from behind the persona of an archetype, maybe because of it.  Either way, he has wielded a sharp sword from his underworld den, and worn the uniform of a warrior in the battle for sanity between men and women, though he might want to tell me to go piss up a rope for saying so.  Recently, Zed agreed to an online interview regarding his personal experiences and perspectives, then and now.

So without further delay, an interview with the man himself.

What brought you into the men’s movement? Or if you don’t like the label, what started so much passionate writing about men and feminism in western culture?

I basically got thrown into it about 40 years ago when I entered the gauntlet of the mating years. I went to an ultra-liberal college just about the time feminism was starting to really take off. Most of the women who were my potential mates were either actively feminist or thought they were expected to be. Men in my age group were raised with one set of values and expectations regarding marriage and then suddenly, just about the time we were getting ready to do it, all the rules changed – or rather, all the “rules” got thrown out and people started making it up as they went along.

I had the luck to be in the right place at the right time to encounter some of the REALLY radical thinkers who harbored an unbelievable hatred for the social values of the time and were dedicated to changing and destroying them – the backbone of the COUNTER culture described by Theodore Roszak. I was certainly part of the Zeitgeist of the time – the “Woodstock Generation”, but neither fully immersed nor completely convinced. Some of what they were saying made sense, and some of it sounded completely wacko. Like many people at that age, I made the erroneous assumption that most people thought the same way I did and that the parts, which made sense, would get adopted and the rest of it dismissed.

One thing, which baffled me, was the seeming inability of so many people to recognize the profoundly anti-male foundations of feminist thought. It was a fairly common rumination of young women in those days “Can I be a feminist and still like men?” The effects of lesbian thinkers like Kate Millet on defining what feminism was and was to become made it impossible for feminism to be anything other than adversarial toward men.

By the mid-1970s it was becoming obvious that the target of the wedge to be driven between men and women was going to be based on sexuality. That is the foundation mechanism for bringing men and women together as men and women, and men were seen as sexual competitors by lesbians in their pursuit of sexual relations with women. Susan Brownmiller covered the “sexuality as victimization of women” angle with “Against Our Wills”, and Shere Hite covered the sexual satisfaction of women angle with her report on female sexuality. It was pretty obvious that one core strategy was to alienate women from men sexually, and thus attack the most fundamental force of the man-woman pair bond.

As this theme got carried forward by MacKinnon, Dworkin, and Koss, I kept expecting people to wake up and start to dismiss it. My opposition and counter-argument gradually intensified over a 30-35 year span of time, evidentially resulting in the level of intensity you see today in my writing – what you call “passion.”

If you were to give a state of the union address on the condition of modern men, what would some of the highlights be?

Unlike a lot of guys who hang around with “Men’s Rights” types, I’m far more positive about the condition of modern men than most of them. A lot of men are leading longer, healthier, lives than the average man ever has before in history. We have what is from a historic perspective a miraculous level of health care available to us. The modern world is full of convenience, and comfort, and simple survival is no longer the real challenge that it used to be for a lot of men.

I also think men have a great deal more freedom regarding life choices – if they choose to exercise that freedom – than the average man has in the past. The social changes of the past half-century have made the provider role optional for men. We are now free to choose lower stress ways to make a living and pursue that “work-life balance” which is one of the favorite buzzwords of our contemporary culture.

Modern communications technology has made ignorance of any subject a choice – the internet alone puts far more information resources at anyone’s fingertips than even huge university libraries had when I was growing up. Transportation technology gives us mobility that was only dreamed of barely a century ago. I can literally get to almost any part of the world in a few hours – instead a few weeks or months. The real barrier today to a man’s horizons is his motivation, drive, and interest – compared to times past when the simple act of traveling a few hundred miles was arduous and challenging.

And, something which a lot of people don’t think about is the fact that there are fewer men from the United States – both in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage of the population – who are walking around crippled or mutilated as a result of war than at probably any time in the past; certainly in the past 150 years or so.

Statistics and factoids, unfortunately, do not do a very good job of capturing a sense of what an environment is really like. To try to illustrate what social conditions were like in the past compared to today, I like to use the example of building the Panama Canal. Approximately 25,000 men died during its construction. Now, try to imagine for a moment what social conditions must have been like for so many men to find it attractive to take that kind of risk with their lives. How many men do you know today who would volunteer to head off to the jungle and face a high probability of death? The pressures going on in the lives of those men are probably beyond anything we can imagine today.

Or, take the “White Feather” campaign. Imagine being so sensitive to social pressure that having a woman hand you a white feather would be shameful enough that you would sign up to go to war in order to avoid it. I think a lot of men today, probably most if we are talking about younger men, would say “Take that feather and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

Or, consider the “Mormon Migration.” Between 1846 and 1868, thousands of people made the arduous 1300-mile journey from Nauvoo, Illinois (or Independence, Missouri) to the area of Salt Lake City, Utah. Many made the trek on foot pushing the sum total of their worldly possessions in a handcart. Many perished along the way.

Imagine a life so hard and hopeless that walking a thousand miles or more dragging everything you own in a handcart was an attractive alternative. Then look around at the life you lead today and try to tell me with a straight face that you don’t have things pretty darned good.

You’ve said that the provider role for men is “optional” in modern times. Some might argue that this is true, but primarily in the abstract.  What would you say to those that would point to the combination of female expectations being relatively unchanged with the fact that most young men are still raised with the provider role as the mandate?  Doesn’t this give the word “choice” a slightly different meaning?

I suppose it is a matter of comparative degree.  I don’t see anything like the pressure to live up to that role that men my age were subjected to.  When I was 4-5-6 years old my old man would kick me out of bed at oh-dark-thirty in the morning to go hunting because “We have to provide for the family.  That is our job as men!”  Even with that sort of upbringing, I was able to shed my own expectations that I would live up to that role like a snake sheds its skin when I started hearing that providing for women was “oppressing” them.

It may simply be my situation, but when I look around at the world in my local vicinity I don’t see that much pressure on young men to be the sole provider.  My great-niece is a young married with a 2 y/o child and I don’t think her being a SAHM and not working was ever on the table with her and her husband.  It seemed to be just assumed by both of them that she would use the college degree her father paid for her to get and contribute to the maintenance of their lifestyle. Even among my age and social group, unemployed wives are rare.  In my personal experience, shared breadwinning is the norm and the man doing it alone is rare.

I don’t think that single mothers can indoctrinate a boy into believing that role is part of his identity the way that fathers used to.  With 40% of children being born to single mothers these days, and something like 60% of all children spending some of their childhood years in a single parent family, the father, as “provider” is no longer the norm at all.  I think the subtle shift from resident parent to payer-of-child-support which fatherhood has gone through in the past few decades will have a profound effect on the way future men view their role, with the unfortunate effect that children will become bills to pay – more like the cable bill and utilities than actual direct involvement in their lives.

In the UK within the past couple of years a survey of school-aged children found that a full quarter of them did not see a “father” as an essential part of a “family.”  It is also the case there now that the mother can put the name of anyone she wants on the birth certificate in the blank labeled “Parent B.”

So, as opposed to boys who grew up in families which were “mom and dad and the kids” who saw all those roles as being part of a “family”, a lot of kids are growing up with absent dads who are somewhat to largely unknown to them except as senders of checks.  I don’t believe that a boy who grows up without a man in that role to be a model for it and pass it on will see it as an integral part of his identity.

Add to that the fact that boys have been somewhat driven out of higher education, and men simply won’t be in a position to be able to live that role.  At that point, yes, the word “choice” does kind of drop out of the picture and they won’t have much choice to live up to that role if they choose to have families.  If they choose to only support themselves, which I think a lot of men will do, then they do still have choices.

What are your thoughts on modern marriage? Is it advisable for men, women? Are the problems ”fixable?”

Marriage as most people understand it and think of it doesn’t exist any more. Around the net you will see this idea reflected in it being called “Marriage 2.0? to distinguish it from what people normally think of when they hear or see the word “marriage.” It has been transformed from a core social institution – one of the hallmarks of full adulthood and citizenship – to a vehicle for personal gratification and entertainment. The current expectations and beliefs about marriage are far too unrealistic to work for most people.

And the value systems which emphasized delayed gratification and long-term planning over immediate gratification no longer exist

I think trends are emerging which reflect a return to marital patterns of several hundred years ago – relatively affluent people are using marriage to pool and aggregate resources, while the less wealthy are more likely to be involved in a series of temporary relationships – with or without children.

You pointed to the trend toward transience in modern relationships, with or without children, particularly in lower socio-economic groups.  Do you see an impact from this on social factors like crime?  Do you think that humans as a species can eventually adapt effectively to the resultant norm of so many children being fatherless?  And by adapt effectively, I am saying maintain rule of law and continue technological progress.

Good questions.  There is certainly a “narrative” among MRA types that a descent into a more matriarchal social structure is going to lead to increased crime and decreased progress, I think there are whole lot of X factors out there which may not necessarily be being taken into account in those grim predictions.

First, one has to question how many scientists, etc. a culture actually needs in order to progress.  Second, one has to define some sort of guideline for rate of progress

To illustrate what I’m trying to convey here – the US population crossed the 200 million mark between 1967 and 1968.  Let’s take a hypothetical 1% of the population involved somehow in technological progress – 2 million.  The years since 1968 have been no slouch in that department.  Now that the population is 300 million, do we need the same 1%, or 3 million now, to maintain the same rate of progress?  Or will the same 2 million maintain us at the same rate while another million make us progress faster?

The issue is less what happens at the cultural level than what is likely to happen to subgroups within the culture. Fathers certainly tend to motivate children to achieve, and being a father – a father actively involved in a child’s life, that is – certainly motivates men to be as productive as they can.  What I think you will see is a progressive two-tier culture in which the ones in the top tier are not doing badly at all, and the ones in the bottom tier have very difficult lives.  The UK seems to be is ahead of us in terms of fatherlessness, and indications are that the rate violence is going to go up and even the upper tier group is going to be less safe.

I’m a bit more concerned about the overall levels within the economy and the drain on it represented by the lower tier in terms of public benefits.  As the number of producer’s shrinks and the number of non-producing dependents grows, eventually I think the economy will stall.  At that point I do think general technological progress of the culture as a whole will slow down, and violence will increase – look at what happened in Argentina

Many members of the MRM seem to fall into more conservative camps. Do you think modern conservative politics, as they are practiced, hold any promise for men in general? Is this a better option than the other side of the partisan fence?

No. The biggest problem is that there is no real coherent body of conservative thought any more. Every ideological camp is approaching value systems like cafeterias of beliefs from which they can choose the ones they think “taste” best. At best what we have today is the choice between full-bore leftist and a sort of “liberalism lite.” The so-called “conservative” political leaders of the past few decades have expanded government as much or more than any of the fire-breathing radicals could dream of.

The biggest flaw with what passes for conservatism these days is that most conservatives refuse to acknowledge that times and social conditions have changed radically in the past 50 years and they are trying to hold men to standards of behavior that were part of a system of values that no longer exists. I always think of the old Biblical story of the Exodus and the incident where the Pharaoh reacts to Moses by saying that he would no longer provide straw for the people to make bricks – that they would have to gather it from the fields at night – but they would still be required to produce the same number of bricks. All of the social support systems for men living up to those old traditional roles have been progressively de(con)structed, but men are still expected and required to produce the same number of bricks.

There is a lot of pressure from the SoCons (Social Conservatives) to hold men accountable for the traditional male role, while women are allowed to do whatever they please. They have attempted to replace social values and pressure with an extensive legal enforcement system, and live in denial that conditions are such that it is just about impossible for the average man to live up to their traditional ideas of manhood.

It isn’t working, and the more it doesn’t work the more that both sides of the political aisle bash men for that fact.

Do you think women, at least in western culture, were ever oppressed? Why or why not?

No. And this is one of my sorest spots. Life used to have a lot of challenges and survival was by no means assured for ANYONE. Simply surviving required everyone to do what it took to survive, whether they wanted to do that or not.

Instead of looking at all the advancements made by civilization, all the comfort and relative safety we enjoy now, and regarding that as a monumental achievement; the “oppression” mentality interprets how long it took to achieve this level of relative wealth, safety, comfort, and convenience, not as a measure of how great the achievement really is, but rather as evidence of malice on the part of someone for not giving them near-utopia sooner.

Do the problems men face today lie in the laps of women? In gender politics? Or in men?

Of the three, I think men have the most power to address their “problems”, and therefore bear the greatest responsibility for doing something about them. Gender politics is certainly a mess, but I have a somewhat colder and more detached view of how that plays out than many people have.

There is no getting around the fact that “men” have been the primary agents in developing the anti-male legal and educational climate in which we now live. So right away we’ve already divided “men” into a couple of different groups, which have conflicting agendas. Mike Nifong and Joe Biden are both “men”, as far as I know, and both have been very active agents in pursuing courses of action which have harmed other men.

So, we actually have three groups here instead of two – men who burn other men, the women they do it on behalf of, and the men they burn. Of these three groups, only the last sees that there even is a problem. There is no way to convince people to address a “problem” that they do not perceive as existing.

Thus, the responsibility lies squarely on the people who think there is a problem to come up with ways to address it. If they have not, or will not, they are the ones who suffer, which would cause most rational people to expect them to be the ones to be most motivated to do something about the “problems.”

The problem with the “problems” is that they are far older and far larger than feminism. The area of North America that became the United States practiced slavery for hundreds of years, and many people did not see that as a “problem.” The Bill of Rights of the US Constitution very explicitly spelled out some rights which the government could not take from the people, which would lead to the reasonable conclusion that the framers of the Constitution had studied enough history to know that certain patterns of human behavior crop up over and over.

The fact that these patterns of mass behavior are beginning to manifest themselves again really should not be that much of a surprise to anyone who has studied much history. And, confronting the obtuseness and resistance of the average person when trying to make them aware of the dangers inherent in the growth of government power makes a lot of history more understandable.

Women for the most part are not coming after men with guns and forcing them at gunpoint to give the women what they want. Almost every “problem” that is affecting men these days began with a situation in which the men participated voluntarily and then conditions changed in a way they did not like.

While I am not without compassion for men who followed social rules and values in conducting their relationships with women and got burned as a result, my general level of compassion does go down a little each day as I encounter men who either ignore or flatly refute the evidence right in front of their own eyes. It’s difficult to feel much empathy for someone who stubbornly engages in willful denial.

You and I have been on enough discussion lists together to know that what “men” seem to do more of and better than they do anything else is chew each other out for not doing enough to fix the problem, call each other names, and brag about how much smarter they are than everyone else. Many times I have observed the impossibility of convincing a man that there is a problem any time up until the divorce papers hit, and frequently even afterward.

Personally, I have given up on wasting my time trying to convince men like that, and am quite happy these days to let life experience make my points to them for me. I think when the number of men who have been burned by the system reaches critical mass that we will see a rather abrupt and significant shift in the prevailing attitudes.

Until then, it is on the men who are aware of the problems to take whatever measures they have to in order to minimize their own risk.

Feminists have attempted to re-engineer masculinity over the past 40 years. Has it worked? Are men inherently different than they were in 1969?

I think we have to separate the biological attribute of maleness from the social expectations of what “being a man” or social masculinity is about.

First of all, I totally reject the nonsense of “gender is a social construct.” That is truly messed up thinking and exists on the same level as belief in magic. Sex is a biological fact. Most people are born in some variation of two standard models of human beings and there is a lot of recent research showing that there are some fundamental differences in the average expression of those two models.

There are some disturbing biological findings that indicate environmental pollution may be causing some severe effects on masculine development. Supposedly both sperm counts and testosterone levels have fallen in men over the past 50 years. Populations of both humans and animals are experiencing a shift in sex ratios of births, and males of some species are showing distinct signs of feminization.

But, setting those considerations aside for a moment as being more issues of degree than kind, no I don’t think men are substantially different than they were in 1969 – biologically.

However, the social definitions of manhood and masculinity have changed somewhat. But, bear in mind these are more issues of fad and fashion than actual substantive changes. If you take a quick survey across human cultures and history, the ways that cultures developed to manifest and manage natural human traits are almost infinitely variable. For example, in 17th Century Europe (France, for example) men commonly wore powdered wigs, high-heeled shoes, fancy stockings and lots of lace – all things we associate today with feminine fashion.

You might be surprised at what I see as the major change – which is not in how men actually are, but in our expectations and definitions of manhood or masculinity. I think we have seen less change in how men are actually behaving than in mass media influenced archetypes of manhood. We have this John Wayne mystique as a template for the archetypal “REAL Man(tm)” which is completely bogus and unrealistic. Even “John Wayne” never actually behaved like the character he created of “The Duke.” The reality of the man behind the myth is of someone who was named “Marion Robert Morrison” when he was born, and who never once actually engaged in any of the wartime activities of so many of his movies – but rather sat out the war as a studio pretty boy getting manicures, hawking war bonds, and chasing the wives and girlfriends of the men who were actually doing what he only pretended to do.

I think this one-dimensional caricature of manhood/masculinity is very confining and destructive. First and foremost, it is BOGUS, it is fiction. It bears no relationship at all to reality. That is a fundamental point. Most people are grounded enough in reality to realize that they are not Spiderman, or Superman, or Batman – those characters are clearly artificial and thus can be part of harmless fantasy. The problem with the character of “The Duke” is that it is believable – people can mistake that for reality, or a prescription of what reality “should” be like.

Compare a guy like John Wayne, “Marion Robert Morrison” (hmm? “MRM”, that’s kind of catchy  ), with an authentic and genuine man like James “Jimmy” Stewart. Not only was Stewart AUTHENTICALLY a soldier, the characters he played as an actor almost invariably had more depth and substance than the one-dimensional characters that Wayne portrayed. They were actually realistic in having a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, human failings and a desire for nobility.  Think of his character in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  George was a “real”, genuine, authentic, man.

Perhaps you have heard of the term “Generica” used to describe the homogenization and blanding which have come about as a result of the growth of national branding. It used to be that each region of the US (and other places as well) had their own character and there was a distinct difference in the atmosphere between, say, a town in the Northeast and one in the Southwest. But, the generification of the ubiquitous shopping mall eliminated a lot of those differences.

I believe the same thing has happened with manhood/masculinity – that we have been force-fed a media created and promoted, one-size-fits-all, view of masculinity that is extremely distorted, unrealistic, and destructive.

And, tying this back to your earlier question about “conservatives”, I think that the SoCons are among the most deluded who have bought in to this John Wayne mythos and are trying to be like Procrustes and force every contemporary man into their own preferred dreamed-up mold of manhood.

For every genuine “John Wayne” type of man, there was also a Walter Mitty. Men are not stamped out with cookie cutter molds in “man factories” creating a single type and model.

My goal for my involvement in the MRM is to reclaim the right for men to lead full human lives as their authentic selves.

You make a pretty clear statement regarding the fallacy of gender as a “social construct.” I am not going to press you for a broad analysis of sexual differences, but I am curious if you think that feminism taught us anything about the similarities between men and women, or if the women’s movement shed any real light on women’s capabilities that wasn’t already a part of the collective consciousness?

The most basic axiom of the study of individual differences is that the variation within a group on any particular measure will always be greater than the differences between the averages of two groups on that same measure.  Broad and rigid generalizations about the differences between those groups will therefore almost always be wrong.

“Men” in general are taller than “Women.”  This obviously does not mean that any and all men are taller than any and all women.  The differences in height between the shortest and tallest man, and the shortest and tallest woman, are going to be much greater than the difference between the average height of men and women.

Feminism promised that both sexes would be “liberated” from the rigid stereotypes which used to exist in the form of “(all) Women are _______ ” or “(all) Men are _________ .”  If feminists had actually delivered on that promise, I think it would have been to everyone’s benefit.

But that is not what happened.  The feminist narrative skillfully mixes very rigid positive stereotypes of women and very negative stereotypes of men with hysterical outbursts if anyone so much as mentions the possibility of a difference that may not advantage women – e.g. Larry Summers.  Thus, they hold tightly to the “all women are better nurturers than ANY man” to maintain their advantages like child custody following divorce.  And they viciously defend the stereotype of the pure moral woman when it comes to things like Domestic Violence and false accusations – “women don’t lie”, “women are only violent when they are defending themselves from abusive men.”

I think if the changes of the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that women are capable of every bit as much human destructiveness as men.  When the cult of the moral woman is destroyed, and people begin to accept women as human beings with capacity for both good and extremely bad behaviors, then maybe a path will be cleared to something resembling real equality.

Where do you see men in 10 years? A hundred?

Don’t have a clue. And I’m not really being a smartass here. If you want a great stock tip, ask me what I would do and then do the opposite. My crystal ball was consistently so worthless I just tossed the fool thing out.

I think men will adapt, that’s about all I can say. There may be a lot of people who don’t like HOW they choose to adapt – the advocates of “Game”, for example – but they are going to adapt to the culture the best they can.

In recent years we have seen some new additions to the MRA lexicon.  Words like “mangina.”  We have also seen much more of a challenge to the concepts of chivalry and traditionalism, even a growing rejection of what Farrell coined as the male role of being “disposable.”  Your statement that you don’t have a crystal ball has been duly noted, but I am curious if you see the possibility of this mentality becoming the norm for western men?

Yes, I do.  What I see happening culturally is like one of those old cartoons with a character who has each foot on something that is moving apart from the other foot.  Eventually the feet are going to move so far apart that the character does the splits and falls down.  The short term ability we have seen of the culture to practice doublethink – holding two contradictory and mutually exclusive beliefs to both be true – will eventually give way to evidence and changing cultural perceptions.

I just saw a comment on The Spearhead -

“Men used to be chivalrous with all women because it was assumed that most women are virtuous. Now that most women aren’t virtuous, chivalry is dying.”

The new narratives among young men about female hypergamy, young women loving bad boys and passing over nice guys, and the whole “party away your 20s, then find some affluent man to pick up the bill” show that younger men see women entirely differently than older men do.  Guys with ex-wives who have taken them to the cleaners in family courts and kept them from seeing their children simply are not going to have on the same sort of rose colored glasses when they look at women that older men who still think women are like they were 50 years ago have.

And, here is where I think fatherlessness is going to have the greatest impact. Boys raised by mothers with mental issues who did not have a father to counter-balance that and give them some sanity and stability in their lives are not going to have any source of traditional values and the whole set of ideas and beliefs are going to be completely alien to them.

What do you make of the overall state of women in modern culture? Has feminism helped women toward the constitutional ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Back in 1970 or ‘71, Norman Mailer came out with a book called “Prisoner of Sex.” In his introduction he mentioned his belief that women had “the better half of the deal, already.” I agreed with him then, and still do. I think women have lost far more as a result of feminism than men have. They enthusiastically threw away that “deal”, thinking that men had it better, and now that it is gone there is no way back for women.

Just look at the foundation premises (not all the victimhood which is just the natural feminine character overlaid on the ideology) – women, as they were and acted 50 years ago, had something wrong with them. The only way they could be considered valid human beings was to become more like men and do what men did.

In short, “feminism”, contrary to its name, actively threw away any uniquely female identity. A lawyer is a lawyer, not a woman.

Personally, I believe this is a big part of what is behind the unbelievably overt and outrageous displays of female sexuality which have become characteristic of women – without all those “oppressive” social positions which women used to occupy outside the fast lane of earning money, the only uniquely “female” identity women have left is the sexual one.

The Men’s Movement has been stuttering phenomena, with a lot of false starts. We seem to be gaining some traction recently, but it’s not the first time for that, either. Do you get disenchanted with this? How do you keep yourself going with so little move in the movement?

It’s a mental orientation that few people seem to share. It begins with the idea that I, and no one else, am responsible for the quality and conditions of my life.

To play the devils advocate for a moment, what in the world do we NEED a “men’s movement” for? I think that if you dig down under all the layers of rhetoric, you will almost universally find that what most people are saying (both in and out of the MRM) is “I wish other people would change so that the world would become more like I wish it was.”

People get trapped by their values and beliefs about how things “should” be. And, they want everyone to get together and behave in a way that brings that about. The problem stems from the fact that people’s beliefs are all over the place and there is very little consensus regarding which particular set of “shoulds” are going to be implemented.

My generation of men was tremendously affected by the Vietnam War, so maybe using that as an analogy will illustrate something, which is fairly subtle and goes against the grain of most people’s thinking.

When I was in my teens the US was involved in the war and young men were being conscripted to fight it. What they wanted or preferred was simply not on the table as anything to consider – they were forced to go whether they wanted to or not. Any guy who didn’t show up at the induction center when ordered to was hunted down by federal marshalls and dragged there in handcuffs and leg irons.

It really sucked, but that was the way it was.

They went through basic training, and then were shipped over to SE Asia and plopped down in the middle of the jungle where people shot at them, dug pits and lined the bottom with poisoned sharpened bamboo stakes, and generally did everything they could to harm or kill the young men who didn’t really want to be there in the first place.

It really sucked, but that was the way it was.

Over the years I have developed the view that I live in a sort of “gender Vietnam.” I have absolutely no legal protections from a woman who decides to behave in a sociopathic manner. If I trust a woman and she betrays that trust and burns me, the most likely cultural reaction I will get is that it is my fault for trusting her.

It really sucks, but that is the way it is.

It all boils down to accepting the risks inherent in the environment and taking appropriate measures to manage them. I can do whatever I want to try to change that environment, but must bear in mind that it isn’t changed yet, so I have to live in it as it is – not as I wish it were.

Doing that requires certain mental adaptations that are not the most fun things in the world, but are not absolutely horrible, either. In the grand scheme of things, simply making sure that I am never alone with a female co-worker without witnesses present, for example, in order to protect myself against a bogus “sexual harassment” accusation, requires nothing more than a slight adjustment to my thinking. Moving women from the mental category of “potential romantic partner” to “potential  false accuser” has other benefits as well.

So, the short answer to your question is that I do what I can to change the world I live in to what I want it to be, at the same time I realistically assess the world that I DO live in and conduct myself in a way which minimizes the hazards it contains for me.

If there were any single piece of advice that you could give a young man coming of age in modern times, what would that be?

“Never get yourself into a situation that you can’t get yourself out of.”

It is a serious mistake to depend completely on someone else for our own salvation and well being. They may rescue us, and they may not. To whatever extent a man can control his own circumstances and destiny, he will benefit from doing so.

First, a word of thanks, Zed, for taking the time to answer these questions and for so many years of writing that have compelled many of us to challenge the thinking of others and our own thinking as well.  If you would please, tell us about the meaning of the name Zed.  It is one of a small handful of names you have used in your writings. Does this indicate you are still a work in progress?

Mike LaSalle nailed it in a comment to one of my pieces here on MND – it comes from the movie Zardoz, which I think has a lot of allegorical meaning for our current circumstances. .  The name Zed is a literary device indicating some sort of end.  The last letter of some alphabets is often called “zed” – as in “From Ah to zed”, A to Z.  As Zed in the movie was the agent to end the boredom and ennui of the “immortals”, trapped by their own success at dealing with all the nasty un-fun tribulations of real life into a sterile existence which drove them insane, in my more melodramatic days I dedicated myself to being an agent for bringing about the end of some forces and trends which I saw as being very destructive.

——————————————-

This concludes my interview with Zed.  I mentioned at the beginning that my introduction to the man was a tad frictional.  It wasn’t the last time there was friction, either.  But through some of the lessons I have learned to view that friction in pretty good context.  Because, you never know.  The fellow that tells you one day to go piss up a rope might be your mentor or your friend the next.

Sometimes both.

More of Zed can be read at The Spearhead and in his contributions to MND.

Paul Elam is the Editor-in-Chief for Men’s News Daily and the publisher of A Voice for men.

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Dr. Paul Kengor: Dr. George Schroeder, welcome to “V&V Q&A.” Dr. George Schroeder: Thank you, Dr. Kengor. I consider it an honor and privilege to share my views and opinions with your readers. Kengor: First off, tell us a bit about your background.

Schroeder: I was born in a border town in West Germany, divided by the border of East and West, prior to German re-unification. Multilingual, I am versed in the socio-cultural norms, customs, and vast political differences across continents of Europe, South America, North America, and especially Canada. Kengor: This past week, the world marked the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What did that wall—and its fall—mean to you? How is this personal to you?

Schroeder: As eloquently expressed in a statesman-like, Thatcher-esque address to a joint session of Congress, German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered an unwavering admonition: “Freedom is precious, and attained only through great, almost insurmountable challenges, and must be fought for and maintained every day.”

What makes it personal to me, particularly now as a grateful, newly naturalized American citizen, is that I mourn the deaths of those who desired freedom with such passion and intensity that they gave their lives in the relentless and perilous pursuit of freedom. In coming to America, I hope to bring honor to the memory of their dream, their fervent quest and desire, which had been foiled by a totalitarian oppressive regime—one whose guns were pointed only inward, toward the east.

Kengor: Where did you go to school? What kind of medicine do you practice, and where?

Schroeder: Grammar school in Europe, high school partly in South America, and Canada. College and medical school in Canada, and a masters’ degree in healthcare management at the University of Texas. My areas of medical practice specialization are Urgent Care and Emergency Medicine. I’ve practiced in Canada and the United States. I also assisted my parents in building a rural-outreach, primary-care clinic and freestanding surgical suite in South America, which was equipped with instruments donated by philanthropic Americans serving a native population.

Kengor: What can you tell us about medical-care delivery in those countries, especially compared to the American system? Most important, tell us what’s happening in Germany right now with government healthcare.

Schroeder: The finest quality of medical care is delivered to patients in the United States.

Government involvement in healthcare has eroded choice, access, efficiency, and, thereby, quality. It has done so in direct proportion to government control of healthcare. The recent center-right coalition in Germany, which is emblematic of a repudiation of Marxist policies since the fall of the Iron Curtain, has led the new pro-business FDP (“Freedom Party”) to announce as its first policy initiative to roll back “The Public Option,” known as the “Gesundheitsfonds.”

My aunt Gretchen in Germany, who would have been 77 years old on November 9, died of cancer last year. She died near Heidelberg, Germany—one of the finest medical centers in that country. Knowing her cancer cell type and staging of her tumor, I am convinced she would be alive today if she had been treated for her curable tumor in America. So, that makes November 9 even more personally significant for me. If, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, Germany had a free-market medical system of innovative excellence, like we have in America, instead of a system devised by a red-green, left-wing, socialist coalition which bred mediocrity, my aunt would have received the doses and type of chemotherapy and radiation she needed.

Europe has painstakingly learned the folly and detrimental effects of socialized government control of healthcare.

Kengor: Now, today, you practice in America. What lessons have you gleaned from other systems that apply to the current debate in America over healthcare?

Schroeder: I have practiced medicine for over 25 years. Ten of those years, I have practiced in Canada, for which I was never sued, even once, because of a different paradigm (no contingency fees for attorneys) as well as a less litigious culture.

Over my 15 years in four states in America, I was named as a co-defendant in suits, and released along with other co-defendants in the uniquely American tort system, and never named into the dreaded physician National Data Bank listing egregious errors and mistakes by physicians and hospitals in America.

Defensive medicine in America causes significant and unnecessary cost escalation. Imposing a socialized government-run system without meaningful tort reform will lead to an irrefutable fiscal calamity. The U.S. system consists of what I descriptively term “Medico-legal disease-care.”

Kengor: How many people in America are genuinely uninsured or somehow not covered? Do those people get medical care?

Schroeder: The true number of uninsured citizens and legal residents of America is fewer than 10 million. The infamous, totally misleading and deliberately inflated number of 46 to 47 million uninsured “Americans”—widely disseminated by mainstream media—does not reflect the fact that approximately one third of those people are undocumented illegal immigrants. And those illegal immigrants are never denied actual medical care. They receive care based on the EMTALA [Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act], which mandates hospital emergency departments to treat “everyone” regardless of coverage. In some cases, this has actually led to deaths of insured Americans diverted in ambulances from crowded emergency departments to other hospitals, and essentially denied timely care for their heart attack or acute coronary event. This has also led to bankruptcy and closure of entire hospitals, particularly along southern border states.

Kengor: Aside from what should be done to “fix” America’s healthcare system, tell us what, in your view, should not be done.

Schroeder: It would be a travesty to have government-funded abortions—abhorrent to even moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats.

Kengor: We hear the words “nationalization” and “socialization.” Are we facing a potential nationalization or socialization of our healthcare system? Could the so-called “public option,” which you call a “misnomer,” be the camel’s nose in the tent, or the slippery slope that takes the nation toward nationalization or socialization? And might that be the real intention of those pushing this benign-sounding “public option?”

Schroeder: This is clearly the case, and it is a rudimentary principle in business as well as any sport in the world, that the entity making the rules and regulations cannot also be competing fairly with competitors delivering a service. In a truly free market, the government cannot function as a team or a player in a game for which it is also the indisputable “referee.”

Consider our current economic situation, which adversely impacts small business in particular. Small business is an essential provider of life-sustaining employment and thereby healthcare coverage. If America implements the “public option,” many companies will drop their employees’ healthcare coverage, leaving them no choice, i.e., no “option,” but to ultimately accept the proposed government-run healthcare coverage—a public healthcare “coverage,” or as it is known in England, “The National Health Service” (N.H.S.)—available to all legal residents and citizens and funded by taxpayers.

Socialism, some Canadian and British expatriates have termed, is “more addictive than heroine.” It is very difficult to roll back once implemented.

Kengor: You say that you’re concerned about a “loss of freedom” in America today, and especially via this current push toward some form of unprecedented, heightened government management of healthcare. Explain that.

Schroeder: Well, consider this question as an illustration: If the government were to take over the privately competing, efficient, dependable, and predictably reliable mail-courier services, such as FedEx or UPS or DHL, and the American people were only allowed to send mail and important documents via the U.S. Postal Service, how would that affect the important and essential delivery of mail and important documents? Loss of individual choice equals loss of freedom.

By attempting to ensure what they refer to as “coverage” for all Americans, what is being concealed in media sound-bites is a basic fact: When you add millions of people to insurance rolls (particularly if they end up being government run), and without adding a significant number of additional providers (more doctors and nurses), rationing of care is inevitable. What good is the government-issued insurance card that all Canadians carry in their wallets if Canadians are placed on a waiting list for life-saving surgery? Then it is not really “coverage,” is it? It sounds good, but you’re not really “covered” if your access is delayed. Some 800,000 Canadians on long waiting lists have come to the United States for life-saving treatments, and almost one out of every five Canadians do not have and cannot find a family doctor in their government-run, socialized healthcare system.

Kengor: To borrow from the Berlin Wall metaphor, do you see the current changes advocated in Washington, by President Obama and the Pelosi-Reid Democratic Congress, as tantamount to the erection of a kind of barrier to healthcare access?

Schroeder: A government takeover of this system—which would inevitably ensue from crowding out decreasingly competitive private companies by preventing them from lowering costs—would lead to unavoidable rationing. Healthcare delayed equals healthcare denied, particularly if you die while on a waiting list.

I’m intrigued by self-declared “experts” in “healthcare” who denigrate the American system as “inferior to Costa Rica and Slovenia,” as arbitrarily measured by their cronies at the United Nations. I wonder, do those same “experts” want to send Americans dying on waiting lists to Costa Rica and Slovenia for their life-saving medical care?

Kengor: How do Americans halt that wall before it’s built?

Schroeder: By engaging their energies in electing term-limited citizen-legislators to all three branches of government, such as my hero, Dr. Tom Coburn. Coburn, a distinguished U.S. senator, over two years ago provided America with his detailed universal healthcare plan (S. 1019), and, most recently, produced another plan in a collaborative and generous fashion (Senate Bill S. 1099, The Patient Care Choice Act). I highly recommend reading Dr. Coburn’s Book, “Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders.”

Americans must make daily phone calls to Capitol Hill as well as local and regional district offices of their elected representatives to ensure that their “freedom to choose”—patient “choice,” the operative part of the title of Dr. Coburn’s bill—is preserved.

Kengor: When did you become an American citizen, George?

Schroeder: In July of this year.

Kengor: Well, you truly understand the essence of American freedom—better than many of the natives. Dr. George Schroeder, thank you for talking to “V&V Q&A.”

Schroeder: Thank you for this honor and privilege, Dr. Kengor, and may God bless America!

— George Schroeder, MD, MS, FACEP, FAAUCM, is a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine and the executive director of medical affairs for the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine. Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values.

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Audio: (part 1) (part 2)

Part II of this transcript available here.

Q. Tell us a little about your online name.  How did you decide upon that name?  What significance does it carry?

I have been asked by my friends Christian J and John Dias, well known and respected Men’s Rights Advocates  to speak in my own voice. They have given me a whole list of questions here to answer and I can tell you it goes on and on. I shall confine myself to just the first in this Podcast.

In fact, even to answer the first properly, in my way, as befits men of precision and depth that you all are will take two podcasts.

They ask that I talk about my online name; how I decided upon it and what significance it carries.  I like questions that focus on Meaning – they are few and far between in the MRM. So sit a while, pour a horn of fine foreign bevvie of distinction and settle in for twenty minutes or so.

I write under two names. Percy and Amfortas.   They are related in a Great Allegorical Story of our Western Cultural era and are Archetypes of all men. In that sense they are meaningful as an MRA. All men have their story, no matter how different those men are or what their circumstances are. A man is a man.

Let me tell you about Percy and Amfortas and you will see what I mean.

The Greeks attempted to define what being a man is about through myths and stories but were hampered by an early and barely glowing form of consciousness about the ‘self’. The wholeness and completeness of a man’s life journey was only slowly dawning on them and they had a peculiarly Asiatic tone. They looked East far more than west.

There were many stories about men as it was difficult to pin down his many aspects in just one, and oddly they were all ‘stageless’. He was a ‘complete’, very much one-dimensional being without much discernible growth. It is how many women  quite blindly see men even today. He looked ‘outward, to the world. He was a traveler; and explorer. He barely looked inward at himself.

This was really odd as they had pretty well nailed down all the detail, all the major stages and attributes of a woman’s life in the myths of Psyche and Hera – the girl and the woman. Just two stories and connected. All men would do well to read these two stories as they tell most of what you need to know about women.

Women were well known in all their aspects two and a half thousand years ago.  Personally I think that this is a natural response to the direction of a man’s interest. He looks at her and figures her out, before he has much of an idea about himself.

Men, the gender accused of being incommunicative described women well while women were as incoherent as today. Just as noisy as well, of course. Women were seen as comparatively less complex though quite dangerous and devious.

Men are very complex, ‘bound’ by women, then as now, but seen then as bits and pieces.

So it was another millennium and a half before Wolfram von Eschebach got around to looking very closely at men who were undergoing the transitional period of breaking free from women and their ways.

It is relevant and still going on.  At that time in what we now call the end of the dark ages, men were beginning to discern themselves, just as they were changing. Men were starting to look at themselves and inside themselves.

There have been subsequent changes over the last thousand years and these were documented in stories too.

The Three Great describers of men as they have moved through two dimensional to three and latterly to a complete four dimensional man are Parzival, The Man of La Mancha and Faust. I recommend any young man reading and comprehending all three before they are twenty. It should be mandatory man-education.

Wolfram’s story ‘Parzival’ is the modern man’s journey, and in it young Percy the ‘Wannabe’ meets, quite briefly, his Uncle Amfortas, a man who holds all the keys to what being a man is for. The story tells what a man is about as well as for.  These are MRA issues. Far more so than Feminism.

We have to wait another eight hundred years to find what a man is, in Faust. It is the first attempt to look into the heart and soul of man and his journey through the landscape of his internal world.

Every man can look at young Percy and see the kernel of his ‘being’ in the world, in him. Any man can. It is a story of the inner ‘Landscape’ of a man.

Percy’s life is one of toil after an initial start of ‘great promise’. He has no Father in his life – like many of today’s boys, regrettably – and is raised by his mother Hertzeloyde  (whose name translates as heart’s sorrow). Mark that. It is an important sign. She does not want him to engage the world at all, but should it befall that she fails to stop him, only on terms that she determines.

She means well; she is a doting mother, but she has created a personal, tight-knit Matriarchy, a ‘Society’ set in a forest, on a farm, a ‘natural’ world, quite deliberately in order to protect him from the world – not so much because she loves her son but because she is heartbroken.

Wolfram makes this point that we all start out under the direct and untrammeled control of a woman, our Mother and that she is a closed-off, sorrowful being. This is our ‘Society’. The one we have with a vengeance, today where cosseted matriarchy rules its childish subjects all through life.  But a matriarchy cannot ‘contain’ a man once a chap attains his true manhood.

I say, she means well, but as with most women what she says and does is not always what she means and Parzival cannot guess the reasons for this ‘society’ he is raised in.  How often do men have to struggle with the female mind that says ‘You know what I mean’ and five minutes later say, ‘That’s not what I meant’.

It was men’s battles, you see, that took her husband, a Great Knight and King, named Gamhuret.  She adored him.  He protected her and provided for her. He gave her a comfortable life with Status. She loved him deeply.  Something all men want. He fought in her name. For her. She was his Purpose and his Comfort. He was hers. As it should be.  But he died in battle for her. This has been the way of men for ten thousand years.

She hated thereafter all that men do, even if it had been for her benefit.

How like feminists today.

Almost Incidentally, but ultimately significantly, there was also another woman in Gamhuret’s life; another wife, Belcane, a foreigner.  It reminds me of the MRA trend to looking at foreign climes for better wives.  It was before he met Hertzloyde.  He had another purpose and another comfort.

Herzeloyde does not trust women. They can all ‘steal’ men from her, even temporarily, just like the world does.  This despite the fact that it was she who took Belcane’s husband.  How very like Today’s woman who is so hypocritical and projecting !

Except today most women push the men away first. Women today, like Carly Simon sings, “Gave away the things they loved and one of them was YOU. Also like the song, they turn it around as an accusation. Women are distrustful of women; They try to control the lives of women, through Feminism and restrict the lives of men, to the point of incarceration.

One wonders about the ‘Heartbreak’ of the Modern Woman. Like then, men fought to protect women and provide for them.

I see the wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries having played a major part in the rise of modern Feminism. So many men died or came back maimed.

Women have a huge guilt built up over hundreds of years of men’s clear sacrifice and struggle to provide and protect, and like Herzloyde, it is an unbearable guilt and is projected out onto men.  It is men’s fault !

Feminism’s roots are in female Guilt.  Neurotic and poisonous.

Eventually, as Percy, the ‘Innocent Fool’, untutored in the ways of the world  reaches mid-teens and his manhood arises in him, he ‘sees’ the world of men pass by his farm and determines to break free.

He leaves home, taking with him only the lessons he has gained from his limited experience. This has consisted mainly of play, often against animal ‘prey’ that he hunts and which gives him sound hunter skills. And also those lessons learned from her – lessons, from a woman’s perspective,  which will damage his life.  She has ‘Rules’; one set of  ‘rules’ for him for dealing with men and one set for women – a double-standard if you like. He is to woo and root women, any and every he meets. Very permissive. !  And treat them all as princesses. !

He is not to show compassion for men. Not even ask much about them. No asking ‘What’ or Why’ or even ‘How’. Men’s curiosity should be directed only toward women  she thinks.

She calls her Rules  ‘politeness’, the roots of the Chivalric code as she wants it to be. (Chivalry was being developed at the time of Wolfram’s writing and women had a big say in its detail, which is why it has always worked more for women’s benefit than men’s.)  He is to fight men all his life. So knowing them and recognizing himself in them, maybe even seeing his father in them, is a nono !

(One other thing. He is made to promise to wear his mother’s silk shift under his armour. It keeps the ‘feminine’ between him and the cold steel. It stops the rust chafing his skin. There is possibly sound reason in men having some softness close to them)

Percy has to take manhood, as there is no one around to give it to him. He understands this from his mother, the one who doesn’t like fighting. And he has to fight, literally, to gain acceptance into the men’s world and to maintain his Integrity in it.  He must be his own man.  It is his first step.

Young Percy has no idea how to go about it but with a total lack of finesse he is spectacularly successful right from the start. Successful, after a fashion.

He becomes a Knight in less than a month, through both his own stumbling ineptitude and fortuitous efforts, and it is at great cost to another man, who, on cue, he picks a fight with and kills. Manhood is passed from one man to another, often at great cost.

You see, he has no way of determining one man from another. As with so many boys today he has never been taught about good men. Virtuous men. Even his father’s goodness has been hidden from him. He does not know what a good man is. He sees only armour and strength. The man inside the armour is an unknown to him. He is quite unaware of what is inside himself. He does not know himself.

Young Percy is a farm-boy. The sort one finds all over the Men’s boards. He has no ‘logic’, although he claims its superiority, just as many young men in the MRM are all passion and hubristic  claim but who could not tell a syllogism from pidgeon shit.

Parzival kills a reasonably good man. An honourable man. And he steals his armour. A good man gone, replaced by an untested and rather dim lad. That’s me, once.

Our generation has seen the severe limitation and dismissal of good men and our education system has produced farm-boys.

We all have to start somewhere. But oh, the damage we do. I do not know anything of the men I have killed. Not even their names.

Young Percy is sent out on the Quest to find the Holy Grail.  It is at the Command of the King and so he goes, along with all the other Knights, of course. They, like him, travel alone, independent, to all the corners of the world. Men, Going Their Own Way, but with a common  Duty. They are United in a Brotherhood.  It is the beginning of a Philosophy for him. A purpose in life. It is Divinely ordered. Not much like today. Maybe we are going backwards.

The Grail he is searching for is the Meaning and Power of Life. It is the Light of the Spirit. It affords us Full Consciousness. It can cure all the ills of the world and restore the Kingdom. That is to be the Task of Men. Their task is to find it. It is our task.

It is a journey into ourselves. A discovery of who we are as men. We have to seek out that treasure that lies deep within us. It is a bigger task than defeating Feminism or even Marxism, and defeating those can only be done by fully conscious men.

On the first evening out on the Quest he meets his Uncle Amfortas, who he has never met before, and who is the Guardian of the Grail.  He is the Old Man inside all of us.  Parzival had not a clue about this.

Amfortas is an old man, very wise, slow, careful, dignified, after a long career as a Knight and King, and he is severely wounded.  He has the Male Wound; the same wound all men have.  Few men even recognise that they are wounded.

He is ambulatory, with difficulty (a bit like me), and rarely leaves his rooms (also a bit like me).  At dinner that evening  Percy sees the Grail paraded through the Hall. He sees and takes benefit from the Cornucopia that can feed and sustain the World. All we have is the ‘gift’ that Men provide from their own meager resources.  But were we to discover our real manhood, our deep humanity, we could restore the world.

But young Percy fails to ask two fundamental questions. The first was about his Uncle’s obvious distress (remembering his mothers rules) and this is the first  ‘fault’ that prevents the Grail passing into his possession. Men still do not ask other men the decent question, the compassionate question.

The second, which is what the vast majority of men and particularly for us, what  MRAs fail to ask was “Who does the Grail serve”.  It was vital. Next day everything is gone.

As he leaves the empty Castle the drawbridge snaps shut, clipping his foot.

How many young men shoot themselves in the foot with their own angry certainties and ignorance.

We as MRAs while providing space for ourselves in small internet crevices, rarely ask the fundamental questions. We are only starting to make the space for understanding other men’s pain. It is our own.

And we still have not approached the question of Who does the Grail serve. Is it just YOU?

I will end this first Podcast here and continue in the next one I do. There will be lessons for us all and many questions for us to ask ourselves.

Please send this podcast to another three men.

Right click to download the MP3s

Audio: (part 1) (part 2)

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Dr. Paul Kengor: Dr. Edwards, your new white paper for The Center for Vision & Values is on E.D. Hirsch Jr. Who is Hirsch, and what is his association with the term “Cultural Literacy?” What has been his impact on public education?

Dr. Jason R. Edwards: Hirsch arrived on the educational scene with a thunderclap in 1988 with the publication of his book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know . He now prefers the term “Core Knowledge,” but he has never wavered in his assertion that all Americans—especially disadvantaged ones—must command a common body of background knowledge in order to succeed. As evidenced by sales of his curriculum, thousands have embraced his argument, though more in the realm of home schools and private schools than public schools.

Kengor: Hirsch has at times angered both the left and the right. How so?

Edwards: Hirsch refuses to be boxed into simple categories, which can frustrate both the left and right. His political goals are “left” but the education methods he advocates are “conservative.” His call for a controlling federal presence in education further muddies the contemporary political water.

Kengor: Would you consider Hirsch a liberal or conservative or moderate, or something else? In rejecting him, aren’t liberals rejecting one of their own?

Edwards: He likes the term “pragmatist” but as he always explains, he is a political liberal dedicated to economic egalitarianism; he even dedicated his arguably most important work ( The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them ) to the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. His frustration comes from the fact that the educational methods he advocates have been labeled “conservative” and thereby rejected by the left. He wants the left to realize that its goals are achievable only through adopting “conservative” educational methods.

Kengor: How is Hirsch received in colleges of education? Do they study him in graduate programs?

Edwards: Assumedly there are exceptions but, overall, Hirsch’s ideas are an anathema to standard education dogma. Hirsch also tends to draw unfavorable distinctions between research done by education faculty and research done by professors of other disciplines—that fact doesn’t make him many friends in America’s colleges of education.

Kengor: Could it be that the left doesn’t like Hirsch because he has favorable views on religious education? In your paper, you write: “Christians would probably be attracted to the fact that Hirsch fully embraces the necessity of all American students to be very familiar with Western Civilization and consequently the Bible. Hirsch certainly thinks it is a major mistake for public schools to avoid discussing and indeed teaching Bible stories, proverbs, and ideas.” This is very interesting, and perhaps why some conservatives like Hirsch. Can you expand on this?

Edwards: The left certainly is uncomfortable with this, but don’t misunderstand: Hirsch does not endorse Christianity. He merely recognizes the obvious: that the West is a product of Christendom. A person cannot understand Western politics, music, art, literature, etc. or even communicate effectively through allusions, metaphors, and stories, without a firm recollection of the Bible. Though not mutually exclusive, one can endorse religious education primarily because one believes Christianity to be true or one can endorse teaching Christianity because it is practically necessary. Ever the pragmatist, Hirsch is in the latter camp.

Kengor: How does the No Child Left Behind act fit with Hirsch?

Edwards: Hirsch called No Child Left Behind one of the most promising pieces of recent legislation. He argues that the education establishment has reacted to it improperly but the fact that Republicans and Democrats joined hands to create national standards in education is part of what Hirsch called for.

Kengor: So, overall, what’s your assessment of Hirsch and his ideas? Has his impact on education been positive?

Edwards: Due both to their importance and general popularity of Hirsch’s ideas, he may well be the most significant educational reformer in the last third of the 20 th century. His proof that memorized knowledge is essential to thinking is invaluable to our culture, which assumes that “critical thinking” is merely the ability to look something up or to cynically deny the existence of truth altogether.

Kengor: A final thought: You will be speaking at our conference this week, on April 16-17, “Faith, Freedom, and Higher Ed: A Vision for the Soul of the University.” Give us a sample of what we’ll be hearing from you.

Edwards: I’m thrilled to be on a panel with my colleague Dr. Andrew Harvey. Our session will explore the role of “place” within higher education. Since universities are now so eager to embrace the virtual world and “global community,” we will explore the importance of the actual physical campus, face-to-face communication, and true community in education. We will approach those topics through the work of Wendell Berry. Like Hirsch, Berry is immensely popular but not easy to categorize as he is frequently both loved and loathed by the left and right.

Kengor: Dr. Edwards, thanks for chatting with V&V Q&A.

Edwards: Thank you for the opportunity.

Dr. Jason R. Edwards is a research fellow with The Center for Vision & Values and an associate professor of education and history at Grove City College. He is also a Center fellow in educational policy and in the study of popular culture. Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of the Center.

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Dr. Paul Kengor: Dr. Herbener, tell us, in short, the difference between how the U.S. government dealt with major economic downturns, including market crashes, in 1920-21 and the 1990s, compared to how it reacted during the 1930s Great Depression and how it is reacting today.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Herbener: There was a 50-percent inflation of the money stock during the First World War. In the resulting boom, the stock market rose 140 percent in the five years from mid-1914 to its peak in mid-1919. Two years later it reached bottom, having fallen 50 percent from its peak level. The federal government did very little to interfere with the liquidation and reallocation process. What followed was a sharp financial downturn and short recession. Prices fell 35 percent in less than a year, unemployment rose, briefly, to 12 percent, but real GNP fell only 2 percent. By 1923, real GNP had reached an all-time high and unemployment stood at 3 percent.

The boom leading up to the Great Depression was bigger. In the five years from October 1924 to its peak in October 1929, the stock market rose 260 percent. Three years later it bottomed out, having fallen nearly 90 percent. Although less vigorously than FDR, Herbert Hoover intervened in the economy in ways not seen since the First World War. One of his favorite policies was to attempt to prop up prices and wages. As a result, the 35-percent decline of prices that took less than a year in 1920, stretched out for three years. By blocking the efficient adjustment process, the Hoover administration’s policies resulted in 25 percent unemployment and a 30 percent reduction of real GNP by 1933.

Kengor: One of the enduring myths is that Herbert Hoover was somehow laissez faire. Is it true that the crashed economy of the initial Great Depression (1929-33), had largely recovered prior to FDR’s New Deal? Arguably, it was the intervention of the New Deal that caused the sharp downturn in 1937, which ultimately worsened and prolonged the Great Depression?

Herbener: After 1933, the economy began to recover. From its low point in mid-1932, the stock market rose 373 percent by early 1937. While still nearly 50 percent below its pre-crash high in October 1929, the stock market gains between 1932 and 1937 reflected a significant recovery. By 1937, real GNP had regained nearly all that it had lost from 1929 to 1933 and the unemployment rate had fallen to 14 percent. Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies hindered the recovery. Price controls and crop destruction in agriculture, cartelization of businesses, fiat paper money, bailouts, labor-union privileges, make-work projects, and so on, prevented a complete recovery as had occurred after the bust of the early 1920s. As the Supreme Court struck down early New Deal legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act, in July 1935, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, in January 1936, a more robust recovery appeared possible. Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme in 1936 and later appointments to the court, however, led to a reversal and the court’s seal of approval to the New Deal. The economy sagged under the anticipation of greater government burdens. From early 1937 to early 1938, the stock market fell 50 percent, real GNP declined 4 percent, and unemployment rose to 19 percent.

Kengor: You say that it isn’t a mystery how World War II solved the unemployment problem during the Great Depression. Solve that mystery for us here.

Herbener: During the Second World War, the federal government distorted the capital structure and resource uses even further from normalcy. The government took over production facilities, built new factories, borrowed enormous sums of money, inflated the money stock tremendously, and spent massive amounts of money on war production. Government officials controlled wages and prices in the economy leading to shortages and further distortions of production. Far from leading to economic recovery, practices such as government spending, borrowing, inflating, and controlling prices and production, left the capital structure of the economy more distorted relative to consumer demands than it was in the Great Depression. The transition to a war economy pushed the stock market down 38 percent from the spring of 1940 to spring of 1942.

The unemployment problem was not solved by these policies either. Despite the burdens of New Deal policies, entrepreneurs had managed to adjust production significantly before American entry into the war. The unemployment rate, which stood at 19 percent in 1938, had been cut almost in half to 10 percent by 1941. This left nearly seven million persons unemployed in 1941. The government “solved” the residual unemployment problem by conscripting 10 million men into the armed forces. By extracting such large numbers, conscription squeezed the unemployment rate to the artificially low figure of 1.2 percent in 1944 and impaired labor efficiency in the economy.

Kengor: You say the more interesting mystery is how those 10 million men got jobs when the war was over. How did that happen? Did the government find work for them?

Herbener: Government and academic economists, who had adopted the mistaken view that the massive federal-government expenditure for the war had pulled the economy out of the Great Depression, feared a return to depression after the war when the government slashed its spending and released its conscripts back into civilian life. Instead, the lifting of the burden of government price and production controls, the return of capital capacity to entrepreneurs, the shrinking of the government’s spending, taxing, borrowing, and monetary inflation, paved the way for a smooth transition to normalcy. Free from these burdens, entrepreneurs liquidated and reallocated capital, built new production facilities, started new businesses, and employed more workers. Instead of returning to depression levels after the war, the unemployment rate stood at 3.9 percent in 1946 and 1947 and 3.8 percent in 1949. In 1929, at the height of the boom, the unemployment rate was 3.2 percent.

Kengor: So, what about today? Some are claiming we are headed for an economic disaster akin to the 1930s. Could we be headed for a crash similar to the Great Depression?

Herbener: It depends entirely on government policy. The massive monetary inflation and credit expansion of the past several years engineered by the Fed has led to the financial panic. This reckless policy has opened the door to several highly undesirable outcomes, including a depression, a “lost decade” like the Japanese in the 1990s, a stagflation like the United States in the 1970s, and even a hyperinflation. But whether or not the liquidation and reallocation of the capital structure to restore normalcy occurs quickly and efficiently depends on the extent of government interference with the process. If the government were to slash its spending and taxing, cease its monetary inflation, reduce the burden of its regulations, and leave entrepreneurs free to adjust production, then we could see a rapid and efficient transition, like the early 1920s or after the Second World War. If the government continues on its current course of bailouts, re-inflation, a 21st century New Deal, enhanced regulation, and so on, then difficulties lie ahead. Stay tuned.

Kengor: We certainly will. And we look forward to additional insights from you, Dr. Herbener. Thanks for your time.

Herbener: Thank you.

Dr. Jeffrey M. Herbener is chair of the department of economics at Grove City College and fellow for economic theory & policy with The Center for Vision & Values. Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values.

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