I’m pleased to report that the summer 2004 Cato University seminar was a big success. Over 100 people took part, roughly half high school and college students and half business and professional people. The mix has proven quite conducive to good learning experiences, since the students appreciate being taken seriously as thinkers and the business and professional people are energized by the enthusiasm and excitement of the younger set. In addition, it’s good for the younger folks to meet “old” people (i.e., people from 30 to 100) who favor legalization of narcotics, laissez faire capitalism, legal recognition of gay marriages, free trade, peace, and so on. Appreciation for principles and for upholding ideals need not fade as the years add on, but may be deepened and strengthened.
I’ve been looking through the evaluations of the seminar and found that many of the participants rated the program as the best educational experience they’ve ever had. My hope is that the seminar will, in some sense, never end — that the participants will keep in touch and that they will keep on learning, discussing, thinking, and revising, passing their knowledge and enthusiasm for liberty on to others, from friend to friend and from generation to generation. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that we’ll never definitively “win” the battle between liberty and coercion — since as long as there will be people there will be some who will seek to dominate and coerce others, but that we can expect the battle lines to move forward and back in a perpetual struggle for freedom. Despite not expecting any final victory (for who could predict all the forms that evil may take in future? How many in the 19th century — other than a handful of pessimistic visionaries, such as E. L. Godkin [see below] — could have predicted Bolshevist tyranny or National Socialist terror?), I am an optimist over the long run. And the Cato University seminar has only made me more so. (That’s one reason I’m looking forward to the upcoming seminar on “The Art of Persuasion” in Quebec October 38-31.)
P.S. E. L. Godkin wrote in 1900 in The Nation, “Nationalism in the sense of national greed has supplanted Liberalism. It is an old foe under a new name. By making the aggrandizement of a particular nation a higher end than the welfare of mankind, it has sophisticated the moral sense of Christendom. Aristotle justified slavery, because Barbarians were “naturally” inferior to Greeks, and we have gone back to his philosophy. We hear no more of natural rights, but of inferior races, whose part it is to submit to the government of those whom God has made their superiors. The old fallacy of divine right has once more asserted its ruinous power, and before it is again repudiated there must be international struggles on a terrific scale.”