Growing up Budziszewski

In the May 30 issue of WORLD noted professor and author J. Budziszewski speaks of turning away from socialism and turning toward Christ and an understanding of how God created the world. In our interview he also spoke of growing up.

Born in Milwaukee and living there until age 13, you then had a culture shock. When the family moved to Florida, I learned Southern culture was different. Like many ex-Yankees, I had a “nose in the air” attitude of superiority to the South and I had to get over it.

You became a teenaged leftist. I had been a devout teenager, but came to think of Jesus as a cultural revolutionary so that I could justify my own left-wing politics. I had my own ideas about how to the save the world. They didn’t take seriously the problem of sin and brokenness.

And you also came in contact with the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In college, as I drifted further from an authentic understanding of Christ, I came to realize that I didn’t really believe in Him any more. A little later I found that I didn’t believe in God at all. Still later I found it increasingly difficult to believe in a rationally discernable difference between good and evil. I was influenced by Nietzsche’s statement, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” It didn’t mean that I wanted to do everything, but I thought that in principle I could.

So you came back north in 1970 for two years at the University of Chicago, where two students who were also Nietzsche fans, Leopold and Loeb, had become famous for killing a child and receiving a defense from Clarence Darrow. Yes, but I was a math and science kid and wanted to do biopsychology. That was one reason I chose the University of Chicago, though in fact I never did pursue that field. The other reason was that it had a very left-wing reputation, with lots of radical student activism. I was in YPSL, the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the party of Norman Thomas, Eugene Debs, and Michael Harrington. Pretty conservative for a socialist.

Harrington’s book about the poor, The Other America, was influential? He spoke on campus during my freshman year. My YPSL chapter and I were excited. At his talk, he said people who claimed that socialism couldn’t work because of selfishness were wrong. People were selfish only because of scarcity, and there was scarcity only because of capitalism.

Abolish capitalism and … And there would be a “psychic mutation in human nature.” I thrilled to the phrase. The idea that a little bit of social engineering will eliminate human selfishness is profoundly naïve, but it took me some years to figure that out.

How did “capitalism is wrong” go with “God’s dead so anything goes”? Socialism is confused about whether it has an objective moral basis or not. I was confused in the same way—a nihilist in one part of my mind, but still a moralistic socialist in the other part.

When you were reading Nietzsche did you have a nihilistic attitude regarding sex and marriage? This was difficult, because I had grown up in a stable home with a mom and a dad who loved each other and the kids and provided good models. Sheer inertia made that difficult to throw over. Theoretically I held that I couldn’t distinguish between right or wrong in that realm either, but I was coasting on the habits of a Christian sexual morality.

You got married during the nihilistic period? Not quite, but I was on the way into it. By the way, I really loved my wife. Now love is a commitment to the true good of the other person. Theoretically, though, I didn’t believe in a difference between good and evil, didn’t believe in the reality of other persons, and didn’t believe that my commitments were in my control. At least in some ways you live as though something were true, but you tell yourself that it isn’t. As time goes on, the interior divisions become more and more acute.