New York City
December 20, 1999

On a bleak afternoon last week, in a dim little TV studio in lower Manhattan, Firing Line finally ran out of ammunition. Hosted for 33 years by the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., the show taped its final installment, which will air on PBS stations the week of Dec. 26. Blue and white balloons had been set out to leaven the gloom, as had a panel of younger pundits, including Michael Kinsley and William Kristol. Their conversation was unhurried and intelligent, as it always is on Firing Line. Watching it all, you couldn't help thinking that something more than a TV show was passing away.

Print journalists who appear frequently on TV have a phrase they use after they say something silly or make a factual error. "It's just TV," they shrug, and you can understand the attitude. The conventions of the TV talk show, circa 1999, inflate the trivial and trivialize the important. Watching Hardball's Chris Matthews bark at his guests about tax plans and sex scandals, you wonder why his guests don't cover themselves with dentist's smocks to fend off the flying spittle. Kinsley recalls that as co-host of Crossfire, the CNN shoutfest, he once disagreed with a guest in too civil a tone. "No, no!" the producer shouted into his earpiece. "Get mad! Get mad!"

Until last week Firing Line was there to remind us that TV didn't have to be that way. The show was spawned in the earnest mid-'60s, before popular culture swallowed up the middlebrow and "educational TV" became a comical oxymoron. During last week's taping, Buckley told his guests about David Susskind, the talk pioneer from the 1950s who was host of a show called Open End. "Every night he'd go on the air with some guests at 9," Buckley said, "and he'd keep going -- an hour, two hours, three -- until he got bored."

A few years ago, Buckley cut Firing Line to half an hour from its original hour. But he still scorned the spinning graphics, the thumping theme music, the rushed interruptions for commercial breaks. There were no commercial breaks -- just two or three chairs, a couple of cameras and talk.

And of course there is Buckley himself, with his darting tongue and aristocratic drawl. The final broadcast shows clips of Johnny Carson and Robin Williams hilariously impersonating Buckley. But neither pretender could put an interviewee off balance like the Firing Line host, who at last week's taping leaned in to one of his guests, the liberal New York City politician Mark Green, and said, "You've been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet?"

Buckley prized intellectual combat, but also the careful ventilation of ideas. Last week he cited with pride the fact that the philosopher Mortimer Adler used Firing Line to explicate his elaborate proofs for the existence of God. Somehow, it's hard to imagine Adler on the Jerry Springer Show.

In Firing Line's heyday, Hugh Hefner could discourse on the Playboy "philosophy" and Groucho Marx on the nature of comedy. From Jack Kerouac to Mary McCarthy, and every President from Nixon through Bush, there are few figures of intellectual significance who didn't submit to Buckley's leisurely sparring. He might open a show, as he did with Norman Mailer in 1967, like this: "I should like to begin by asking Mr. Mailer, who has been sentenced to five days in jail for a march on the Pentagon and is appealing on the grounds that he was sentenced because he is famous, to disclose whether he believes that artists should be immune from the harassments of the law." Geraldo couldn't even parse that sentence.

Firing Line was conceived in the ambition that TV could elevate its audience, and Buckley survives as a kind of monument to that goal. He will continue to write books and his popular newspaper column, in which he no doubt will stand against the coarser currents of popular culture. When the Firing Line taping was through last week, and after champagne had been served, Ted Koppel interviewed Buckley for Nightline. At the end, Koppel said, "Mr. Buckley, we have 10 seconds left. Could you sum up in 10 seconds?" Said Buckley simply: "No."

BUCKLEY & ADLER ON WORK AND LEISURE *

BUCKLEY: We embark today on what I hope and will go so far as to predict will be a grand journey: devoted to the ideas of work and leisure as strummed on his encephalophonic guitar by Dr. Mortimer Adler.

It is somewhere written down about Dr. Adler that he stopped by a shop once a few years ago to buy a present for his wife. The sales woman who had tended to him before expressed her curiosity about him, saying, "May I ask what are you?" He replied, "I am a philosopher." Dr. Adler really is that exactly. In the Hellenic society he would not be so noticeable as he is today, because philosophers abounded. They were not so productive as Dr. Adler, but then who is?

So let's get into it and address Dr. Adler's couplings of the ideas of work and leisure. I begin by asking a fairly obvious question. Was the man who began to dig out the Holland Tunnel engaged in work in exactly the same sense in which Michelangelo was engaged in work when he painted the Sistine Chapel?

ADLER: Before I answer that question, Bill, I should tell you what that saleslady said to me after I said, "I'm a philosopher." She said, "Yes, but what do you do for a living?"

BUCKLEY: (laughing) That's right.

ADLER: The word "work" is a generic word that has two species of activity under it. One is toil and the other is leisure. The difference between toil and leisure is the most important distinction that I think we should pay attention to. Toil is that kind of work that no one would do except for the compensation involved because it's unrewarding; it doesn't perfect you in any way at all. It only perfects the product. Certainly Michelangelo was engaged in leisure. He may have been compensated by the popes for doing it, but he was engaged in leisure. The man who built the Holland Tunnel, I think, as an engineer, as a designer, as an architect or a civil engineer was also engaged in leisure, not toil. Both cases work. The toiler is a worker, and the leisure activity is work, but those are two different kinds of work, and many, many forms of work are a middle range of the spectrum between toil and leisure -- mixtures. For example, you and I are mainly engaged in leisure. Everything you've done has been leisure, and everything I've done, but there are elements of toil and we have chores to do. We have certain correspondences we have to engage in, certain minimal activities that we wouldn't do unless we had to that are not self-perfecting. There are very few activities that are pure leisure. I would think not even teaching, for example, or writing a book.

BUCKLEY: Reading?

ADLER: Well, reading is almost pure leisure.

BUCKLEY: Yes, or listening to music.

ADLER: Listening, is pure leisure.

BUCKLEY: Yes, but does the exertion of muscular energy become a factor? For instance, we know that Michelangelo had to strain himself in fact to put those paints up there.

ADLER: No, I don't think so. For example, bookkeeping is, I think, sheer toil for the average bookkeeper. The evidence that it's toil: It's now replaced by computers. Anything a computer can do is mechanical work, totally uncreative, totally noninnovative, and therefore should be done by computers, not by men. When men do what computers can do, they're toiling. Calculation is toil. Logical thinking is toil. Computers can do logical thinking.

BUCKLEY: So is exercise, even though designed to contribute to your longevity or your health.

ADLER: Well, now, exercise, that's mixed. If I go to the physician and he says, "I want you to swim four laps a day -- for your health" -- say you've got a weak back and swimming would help it -- then that is therapeutic play because other people swim for pleasure. When they swim for pure pleasure, it's play. Any activity engaged in solely for the sake of the pleasure inherent in it is play. Any activity engaged in for some extrinsic -- The same swimming can be either play or work or a mixture of both -- play or -- I shouldn't say work. It's sleep because sleep is any form of biologically useful activity; anything therapeutic is sleep -- eating, drinking, eliminating, washing and cleaning oneself generally. There is no one word for all those biologically necessary activities that one engages in repetitiously for the sake of one's health and one's vigor.

BUCKLEY: Okay. Now, having laid out the distinction, I should communicate to you and to the audience that I am endeavoring to reserve the first hour for that which affects the individual as an individual, pretty much as you divided the fields in your book; and the second hour to the individual as a citizen. Now, having distinguished between leisure and toil, do you define a civilized society as one that permits a high degree of leisure as a compensated activity?

ADLER: There's no question about it. One of the aspects of the 20th century that makes it the best century so far is the amazing technological advances that have reduced the amount of time and the number of human beings engaged in toil. We have machinery that does what slaves used to do. Just think, three centuries ago a large part of the human race and in some parts of the world, technologically retarded, a large part of the human race is engaged 10-12 hours a day, often seven days a week, in toil, unremitting toil, degrading to the body, deteriorating to the body, totally unperfecting to the soul and the mind. But that has been changed by the technological advances. I really think today a majority -- 85 percent of our people -- have enough free time to engage in -- I don't think they're trained to do it. I don't think our educational system has prepared them for it. A good educational system would have prepared them for the use of their free time for the pursuits of leisure.

BUCKLEY: Well, how do you account for -- Let me recite a few anomalies. Let's see how you cope with them. St. Simeon, Stylites, and you've got John C. Calhoun relaxing by getting behind the plow and spending three or four hours plowing a field. You've got Thoreau with his obsession with the honest sweat of toil. Now, was this a transubstantiation of toil into leisure done only by an acute moral intelligence?

ADLER: St. Simeon, Stylites, is, of course, a saint and exercising heroic virtue, and I don't think you'd use the -- I mean, he is in some sense scourging the body. I mean, it's a kind of flagellation. In the case of Thoreau and Calhoun, I really would like to put this to you for your consideration: the only thing redeeming about toil is that it is better to toil, in terms of self-respect and dignity, in order to earn a living than taking a welfare payment or a handout. But if one could have no toil, one would lose nothing if all toil were eliminated. So that I would say its total elimination from human life in the future would be a blessing and a godsend. Let's take the housewife for a moment. My grandmother, I remember, at the beginning of the century on Monday morning did the family wash in a tub. Her cooking was on a wood stove. She was toiling most of the time, and that kitchen has been changed remarkably. No woman toils that way now. On the other hand, that toil had one aspect of leisure in it -- she was doing it because she loved the family.

* Transcribed excerpt from Firing Line - Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas (1984) "A Vision of the Future."

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Dear Max and Elaine Weismann,

As I read through the birthday wishes to Mortimer I wondered.... can anyone NOT know that it is through the tireless, selfless, intelligent, diligent work of Mortimer's best disciple and with the help of the loyal, competent partner of that disciple.... that the whole body of Mortimer's wisdom has been kept alive?

Perhaps Mortimer would have been "re-discovered" sometime in the future. But those of us who have lived through the last years of the 20th century, blessed by the unwavering clarity and common sense of MJA have to realize that it was you who kept the message alive after the prophet was gone.

There has been no great rush by the academic-philosophy establishment to see that Mortimer's wisdom is perpetuated, nor has there been any ground swell of public demand for the benefit of his knowledge. Only a few of those who knew Mortimer and believed in his interpretation of what we should seek in life and how we should seek it, remain. In a scant few years we will all be gone, and with us, his wisdom.

Great ideas are carried forward by the scribes who follow the Master. It is through them that we are aware of the message, and it is to them we owe our gratitude. Keeping the flame alive in its pure form is as valuable to posterity as was the initial igniting of it for the then, contemporary world. You have been a faithful disciple and steward. You have kept the message pure and alive because you understand it with your intelligence, and you believe it with your heart.

I wish you both much real happiness,

Dick Wolfe

Thanks for sharing the greetings with us. They were great fun! By the way, our son Sean, age seven, is reading Plato's Meno and loving it. Dr. Adler does more good than he knows. Take care and --

Thanks again,

Sheila and Bill Hansen

Thanks for the Center's help in our seeking to understand truth, and to love good.

Terrence O'Neill

Dear Dr. Adler and Mr. Weismann,

Do you remember me? I am Takuma Terashima, a Japanese student. Thank you for inviting me to your Center. By the way, I will introduce myself.

I am a second year student at Keio University, but I am 24 years old. I have only fragments of information or opinion, so I do not feel I am enough educated. I do not like my university, because it is different from the ideas Adler and Hutchins insisted upon. I remember Hutchins' autobiography. (Adler's is impossible to get now in Japan.) According to him, he had read few books by Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe when he was thirty. He seems to have thought he was not enough educated, though he got Ph.D. at Yale. In Japan, education means passing entrance examination. Students only memorize 'right answers' by 'lecture method' without thinking 'Why?'. As a result, their understanding as well as intellectual skills is poor (containing me). What William Bennett told is applied to Japanese students: 'they graduate knowing almost nothing at all. Or worse still, they graduate thinking that they know everything,' this is because adults do not know how to educate, for they did not also take good education. Though educational issues are lately argued in Japan, I have never heard of the similar ideas as Adler and Hutchins told. They insist on their mere opinion not related to the essence without knowing the achievements great minds made long time ago. In Japan, there are lots of Marxists, social scientists, and law positivists who criticize and deny moral values, family, constitutional government, ownership, and free-market system among universities and mass media. The intellectual culture was affected by 19th European ones, especially German before the war and after that American one in the 1950s and 60s such as social science and experimental psychology. Nobody has studied Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas seriously and corrected their mistakes.

I think Aristotle's books are the core and basis of intellectual life or activity. Aristotle teaches me how to think: classification, comparing, several analytical instruments such as 'the difference of degree and quality' and 'species and genus' etc, (as Newman pointed out 'thinking means reckoning as Aristotle did.') Their books contain several possibilities developed and his tradition such as Scholastic one. Salisbury of John and Hugh of St. Victor as well as 16th Spanish Jesuits and Black friars, and humanists such as Vives are absolutely fascinating. However, I believe Aristotle should not be accepted without reading carefully; they must be read critically and then evaluated by many facts and realities and it has to be compared to other Great Books. In short, it needs challenging by reading and studying thoughtfully and critically over and over again.

Sincerely,

Takuma

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