Today’s movie recommendation: “The Rope” by Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, starring James Stewart. Two well-to-do young men, fresh from their elite colleges, both considered smart with above average IQ’s, committed a murder because they thought themselves to be above morality. Hitchcock probably got the idea from a famous 1924 murder case. The script and the reality are eerily similar.
The reality: On May 21, 1924, Richard Loeb (age 19) and Nathan Leopold (age 20) planned and executed the killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks as he as walking home from school. Loeb, the son of a millionaire Sears and Roebuck executive, and Leopold, the son of a millionaire founder of a box manufacturing company, would be legitimate Mensa Society members. Leopold was a scholar of botany and ornithology, mastered 10 languages, and translated classics from their original Greek and Latin. Loeb was the youngest graduate, at age 17, of the University of Michigan in 1921. They would reunite in a couple of years for their ultimate and horrifying stick-it-to-the-man caper.
Both were fascinated with the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, in an extremely garbled fashion. They were attracted to Nietzsche’s notion of the rise of “supermen” after he predicted the fall of traditional institutions and norms, an idea that resonated with both National Socialists and the Bolsheviks: Lenin had his “vanguard elite” and Hitler his Aryan supermen.
It wouldn’t stop there. An emphasis on an elite of “smart” people with the appropriate college credentials would be a keystone of late 19th-century Progressivism. Progressives valued an unelected class of administrators and regulators – a technocratic elite – to govern society. The conceit is still with us in our expansive administrative state, and as Democrats parade about with their constant use of the term “expert” to nullify opposing views. Their proposals – The Green New Deal for instance – would fast-track the ongoing trend of transferring great power to their preferred class of elite college-credentialed overlords in ever-expanding agencies.
Have we been softened-up to accept this state of affairs? As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I think so. In the movie, a prominent teacher (James Stewart) is presented as a powerful influence on the minds of the killers, until the teacher discovers too late the wayward extent that they took his classroom musings. The earlier pride in his clever mental gymnastics in the classroom is wiped off his face as he discovers the body later in the story. Then he comes to realize his huge mistake.
A similar corruption of the mind was noticed by CS Lewis in his famous tract “The Abolition of Man”. Lewis worried about the dehumanization of young minds occurring in British classrooms of the mid-20th century. In a chapter titled “Men Without Chests”, he wrote of the degradation of rampant subjectivism and relativism in English instruction. Out goes firm standards of good and evil, in comes the unrestrained individual.
Progressivism performs a similar trick. Essential to their understanding is a denigration of the past as corrupt while the present is an improvement on the way to a better world. There’s not much veneration for the old and true. No wonder church attendance is down. Our schools and culture are depressing it.
How about some serious thought of what we are doing to ourselves? Watch the movie.
More on the Leopold and Loeb murder case here.
RogerG