Reflections on the Disorder of Our Times
Hook, Sidney
Reflections on the Disorder of Our Times The following essay is adapted from a speech given by Dr. Sidney Hook at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Open Court...
...The delegates gave the speech a seventy-second standing ovation, the Associated Press reported...
...Only too often history is rewritten for purposes of special pleading or to further a partisan cause or interest...
...Furthermore, if there were no concept of objectivity, we could not distinguish between "guilt" or "innocence" upon which so much of civilized society depends...
...Today in some academic quarters, and in all of the writings of the so-called counterculture, there is an impassioned attack on the whole concept of objectivity and objective truth--especially in history---as if in the last analysis there is no difference between historical fiction and fact...
...The decision to use the atomic bomb to shorten the war with Japan, and thus save lives--whether one considers it right or wrong, and I consider it right or the lesser evil in the historical situation--was a political decision, not one made by scientists...
...Third and most important fact: when the United States had a monopoly On the atomic bomb, which would have permitted it to impose its will on any nation, when even the expacifist and anti-American, Bertrand Russell, urged that it be dropped on the Soviet Union, the United States offered to surrender its monopoly to an international authority...
...Indeed our only hope of counteracting the consequences of past social misuses of science and technology, as our concern with ecology shows, is through more intelligent applications of science, not by a moratorium on scientific discovery...
...A few years ago, the basic course in ~'Social Organization" at a prestigious university drew a mere handful of students...
...multinationals shipped back only 7 percent of their output The Alternative January 1974 7...
...That consensus was expressed as a commitment to the democratic process, and to the mechanisms of registering freely-given consent, a consent freely given because it included the right to dissent...
...The incoherence of the position should be apparent...
...There is something rather odd in the fact that many who cry up the first kind of betrayal play down (when they do not ignore) the second...
...A Republican administration decrees wage-price controls, caring nothing for their long-range impact on the rights of property...
...There is something disheartening about the recent reports of travellers to mainland China who broadcast glowing reports of alleged material gains without any reference to the total suppression of freedom within its borders...
...In 1971, the UN report estimated U.S...
...These trends are more dangerous because of their seeming respectibility and legitimacy...
...These historians not only impugn the concept of objectivity and historical truth, they accuse other historians of errors, distortions, and sometimes outright lies...
...Everyone would be seeking "power" in some way or other...
...But if there was no such thing as truth or objectivity, the very words 'terror," "distortion," "lie" would be meaningless, for their meaning or use depends upon the implicit claim of the person who utters them that he knows the truth...
...Anti-intellectualism is also expressed in a growing tendency to declare certain areas of scientific research as taboo...
...A whole library of literature has developed around this simple and central confusion...
...These betrayers differ only in degree from those Americans who, not satisfied to exercise their perfectly legitimate right to dissent against American involvement in Vietnam, traveled to Hanoi and became not only the apologists of one of the most terroristic regimes in the Communist world, but willing agents in the propaganda pressures to brainwash American prisoners--their fellow citizens--into denouncing their own government, some of whom were tortured for their stubborn refusal to accede...
...This unhistorical and irrational reinterpretation of the past with its use of double standards is also found in reinterpretations of the domestic scene...
...All decisions to use or refrain from using scientific discoveries are social and moral...
...In the scheme of countervailing power, who or what is to hinder the growth of the state...
...Until recently, there seemed to be a rough consensus on these values and ideals in American life even when we differed on the program, parties, and means of achieving them...
...For these reasons it seems to me altogether implausible to interpret all attempts at communication as attempts to dominate others, and completely unjustifiable to present the scientific method of resolving doubt and fixing belief as comparable in any significant way with the familiar modes of exercising power over others by the gun, by money, by status, or by brass 6 The Alternative January 1974 bands and other forms of blandishment...
...It was a commitment to the rights of individuals, and where rights conflict, as they always do in moral situations, to their resolution in the light of the common good...
...But it is this failure to take an intelligent historical approach that seduces persons of good will from being critics within a democratic culture into adversaries dedicated to its overthrow, and converts them, by virtue of the means they use, into hardened immoralists without compassion...
...It is reminiscent of those who brought back glowing reports of material gains made by Italians under Mussolini and by German workers under Hitler as if the costs in human freedom and degradation counted for nothing...
...Fortune, in its August issue, also predict~ a slowing in the rate of multinational expansion as two of the conditions that nurtured their rise--cheap foreign production costs and high tariff barriers--grow less attractive in the seventies...
...We greet each new proposal for state intervention only in terms of its ~'direct and proximate effects," net for its ~direct and distant effects," lamented Herbert Spencer more than one hundred years ago...
...For example, our best prospect of coping with the worst threat to the ultimate survival of mankind in a free and decent society--the threat of overpopulation--depends upon the further advances of science...
...I am not so naive as to think that the disorder of our times can be cured merely by building dikes against irrationalism...
...But until better thinking prevails in the order and connection of our ideas about social order, as well as about social disorder, the less likely is it that we shall devise the policies required to realize the great promise of American life...
...At any rate, it was a proposal accepted by every major nation of the world except the Soviet Union...
...Those without historical perspective think in terms of either-or rather than in terms of more-or-less...
...First of all, the term power is being used in such a broad sense that it has no intelligible opposite...
...The statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal is not a proposition in biology, but in ethics...
...But I cannot forego mentioning the stubborn facts that make a shambles of this mythical reconstruction of the past...
...How well I recall the argument about the scope of presidential executive power when Roosevelt committed American destroyers to fire on German submarines in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic and when Truman committed American troops in Korea...
...Was this a proposal of an imperialist power eager to impose its armed hegemony on the world, as the revisionist historians claim...
...As well say that the invention of writing, which makes it possible to write either a love letter or a poison pen letter, determines what we write...
...The Watergate scandal is the most recent and flagrant betrayal of the implicit political consensus of American democracy...
...Here they express themselves in the forms of absolutism and fanaticism which are almost invariably the consequence of an absence of historical perspective...
...If we take an unhistorical approach to the present, and focus only on the ideal, we become fixated on how far we have fallen short, and disregard the progress made and the distance we have come...
...Remarkable, rather, is the symbolism of it all: the democratically elected socialist leader railing against concentrated economic power (ITrs net worth, Allende grumbled, ~is bigger than the national budgets of several Latin American countries put together"), then flying off to confer with men who dictate without check their nation's politics, economics, and art...
...The all-important direction of the process of change is ignored...
...There is no reason to believe that Dr...
...One congressional witness charged global corporations with ~economic arson," claiming they ~'pnshed the dollar into a new devaluation and drove the price of gold out of sight," In a report widely hailed for its evenhandedness, the United Nations acknowledged the material contributions of multinational corporations even as it stewed over the problem of regulating them: '~rhe power concentrated in their hands, and their actual use of it, their ability to shape demand patterns and values and to influence the lives of peoples and governments . . . have raised concern about their role in world affairs . . . . " For the charge that multinationals export jobs and undermine American incomes, there appears to belittle evidence...
...I cannot make a complete inventory of them, but some are so pervasive as to be easily recognizable on many campuses in the country...
...The AFL-CIO has called the multinational ~a modern-day dinesaur, which eats the jobs of American workers...
...Whatever genetic differences exist among individuals or groups, whether racial, religious, sexual, or ethnic, have no bearing on their political rights as citizens who are equally entitled to the protection of the laws, and to an equality of concern on the part of the community to provide the appropriate social and educational opportunities for each person to develop himself or herself to the fullest growth...
...Just as in a family, the variation in the natural capacities or the IQs of children--which may range from 80 to 140--has no hearing on the right of each child to be treated as a person, with all the rights and privileges of a person, so in the democratic community...
...in the second, we are conscious of no invasion of autonomy...
...multinationals invested $4.8 billion abroad in plants, inventory, and equipment, while generating a return flow of $9 billion in interest, management fees, and other earnings...
...It seems evident to me (and I speak as a critic of the present administration's domestic policy--as distinct from its foreign policy) that so long as we have a tripartite system of government, the result of Montesquieu's misreading of the English constitution, and not the more democratic British system which gives supremacy to Parliament or to the legislature, such conflicts of interpretation are inescapable and must be settled by compromise...
...A few months ago, sixty leading biologists and psychologists issued a manifesto protesting "the suppression, censure, punishment, and defamation that are being applied against scientists who emphasize the role of heredity in human behavior"--both individual and group behavior...
...By 1980, Fortune magazine suggests, the return might reach $20 billion annually...
...The difference in the two situations is reflected in the attitude of the subjects compelled by the force of the fist (or fraud) as distinct from the compulsion of argument to which one yields...
...Nothing illustrates my point so well as the recent attempts to rewrite the history of the Cold War in order to establish either that the United States and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War or that the United States was chiefly, if not completely, responsible for it...
...But in ordinary discourse we make a sharp distinction between inducing the consent of others by force, propaganda, and other nonrational pressures, and inducing their consent by the force of evidence and persuasion...
...John Kenneth Galbraith, the poet laureate of American statism, now urges a dose of socialism for our troubles, never questioning how a yet stronger state might choke individual liberty...
...If democracy is regarded as a way of life, the conclusions of any research into hereditary factors in group or individual learning behavior can he used to help persons realize their educational potential just as the study of hereditary factors in group or individual medicine can be used to help persons to achieve or preserve good health...
...This is a consequence of a failure to distinguish purely scientific questions from moral ones...
...Grave problems and difficulties still abound...
...James Grant Multinationals and the Limits of Power Salvador Allende must have known he was among friends...
...The best results are corrupted into the worst...
...The next day--December 5, 1972---the late Chilean president left New York for Moscow (aboard an Aeroflot jetliner via Algeria), returning home by way of Havana...
...The truth is that the discovery and liberation of atomic energy and nuclear energy did not dictate its uses any more than the invention of the knife or any other of man's tools determined whether they were to be used to preserve or destroy life...
...At any given time, there is always a disparity between worthy moral and social ideals and the status quo, between our goals and our achievements--particularly if we have raised our sights in the course of our struggle towards them...
...These values and ideals, eloquently expressed by the founding philosopher-statesmen of the American Republic, made it possible for us to be vigorous opponents without becoming embittered enemies, to contend with each other within the democratic system without destroying it, and encouraged the submission of all conflicting claims to the arbitrament of reason through civilized discourse...
...It seems to me however that the fanatic is better defined as a person who pursues his goal at all costs, who is willing to pay any price, employ any means to achieve it, even if in the process he destroys equally legitimate goals...
...If thought and its expression were primarily an effort to exercise power over others the very concept of "objectivity" would become unintelligible...
...Throughout, one of its most ominous themes is the denigration of science and of scientific knowledge on the simplistic ground that science is responsible for its technological uses and abuses, for environmental pollutions and military applications...
...Without reference to values, every state of the world is in a state of order...
...This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization," observed Ortega y Gasset in 1932: ~State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State . . . . " Nowhere, it seems, has the ambivalence toward power been more visible than in debate over the multinational corporation (defined as a corporation which pursues a global strategy of investment, production, and marketing, enjoying correspondingly high sales and earnings...
...Here is not the place to argue the point that if there had not been a Cold War to combat Soviet expansion, the world would have been engulfed in a hot war, or its free areas swallowed by a totalitarian despotism...
...Impatience with the gap between ideal and reality leads to an abandonment of the process that has hitherto narrowed it, to a tendency to resort to shortcuts and sometimes to violence that far from diminishing the distance between fact and ideal, provokes the backlash and reaction that increase it...
...Sidney Hook at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Open Court Editorial Advisory Board The times, as I have known them, have always been in a state of disorder...
...So it goes: Of private economic power, which without state leverage is finite, it is asked, "How can we control and regulate this powerT' But of state power, which is infinite, we ask, "How can we broaden this power...
...3LTERN3TII Sidney Hook Reflections on the Disorder of Our Times The following essay is adapted from a speech given by Dr...
...The very meaning of d/sorder presupposes a value or set of values from whose standpoint we assess the state of affairs we regard as disorderly...
...George Santayana once defined a fanatic as a person who having forgotten his goal redoubles his efforts...
...In the case of an inquiry in which several conflicting claims are being negotiated by experiment and analysis, when one reaches a common conclusion with others in consequence of the outcome of the process of inquiry, one feels not a submission to another person's will but to an objective state of affairs which all who are sincerely in quest of the truth must acknowledge...
...I find this erosion not only in the market places and public squares of the nation, but even in our institutions of higher education...
...Disorder and disorganization are perennially popular themes...
...The only condition it made was that inspection be undertaken to detect secret violations that might result in the bomb being used against the United States in an atomic Pearl Harbor...
...The difficulties of this explanation are many...
...The very same persons who took one view then take a quite different view now and discover a constitutional crisis in differences over political issues...
...Combined spending last year reached $382 billion, one-third of the gross national product...
...With respect to every major area and institution in American life----he it civil rights, standards of living and welfare, race relations, access to education---an historical approach will show that incremental reforms have carried us closer to the ideals to which this nation was originally dedicated than has been the case in the vaunted revolutionary Communist regimes anywhere in the world, whose fanatical partisans have held them up to us as models...
...Instead of withdrawing to its prewar borders, it forcibly imposed minority Communist regimes on Central and Eastern Europe in crass violation of the treaties that pledged the Kremlin to abide by free elections...
...Second fact: the United States offered the Marshall Plan to all European nations, even to those in the Communist orbit, to rebuild their economies...
...We need creative intelligence to devise specific policies to modify our institutional practices...
...The attack on objectivity proceeds from the truism that no one can legitimately claim to possess the whore truth or the absolute truth about anything, to the absurdity that there are no degrees of truth or that all views about history are equally probable...
...According to this approach, ideas function as weapons in the clash of opinions that grow out of conflicting interests of nations, parties, and personalities...
...Allende's speech was inspired by the Soviets or that his stop in Cuba was more than ordinarily sinister...
...Thought would then be judged in terms of its success rather than its accuracy, and prevailing lies would be thought more legitimate than suppressed truths...
...The achievements of Communist dictatorships in Russia and China are lauded in the light of their past--history is relevant here!--but the far more impressive achievements of the democratic regimes in Europe and Asia, like West Germany and Japan, in which dissent has not been crushed, are ignored...
...But it is not so much public events that concern me here, as certain trends in the cultural and educational atmosphere that seem to contribute to the intellectual, social, and ultimately moral disorder of our times...
...Usually some narrow and partisan interest couples the attack on historical objectivity with a completely new reading of the past...
...Those who were born yesterday, so to speak, charge the preceding generations with betrayal of the ideal or with hypocrisy in their profession of allegiance to it, as if it makes no difference, because of the perceptible gap between ideal and reality, how wide the gap is, whether the generations that have tried to bridge it have fallen 90, 50, or 10 percent short...
...It was tentatively accepted by Czechoslovakia and Poland until vetoed by Stalin...
...We have no justification, of course, for complacency...
...I mention first the growth of anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, which takes many bizarre forms and centers around cults, doctrines, and charismatic figures from the intellectual underworld...
...The Department of Commerce estimates that foreign afmiates of U.S...
...The purity of spirit of the unhistorical Utopian absolutist, frustrated by a reality it does not comprehend, becomes transmuted into nihilistic rage...
...All Americans who accept the democratic cemmitment~Republicans, Democrats, Socialists---are unanimous in their condemnation of the action and their desire to bring the conspirators to justice...
...It was a commitment to the pursuit of desirable freedoms by the arts of intelligence...
...Not all who invoke the historical approach in politics do so in a rational or scientific spirit...
...The same thing is true of controversies concerning the composition and role of the Supreme Court...
...We are witnessing," he proclaimed before the United Nations General Assembly, ~a pitched battle between the great transnational corporations and sovereign states, for the latter's fundarnental political and military decisions are being interfered with by world organizations which are not . . . accountable to or regulated by any parliament or institution representing the collective interest...
...Sometimes the disregard for objectivity is explained in terms of a definition of the intellectual as one who seeks power by means of the dissemination of his views...
...There is a strong tenThe Alternative January 1974 5 dency today to make one's biology fit one's politics, and from Harvard to Berkeley outstanding scientists exploring the role of heredity in learning are being harassed and threatened...
...And unless there were some preliminary agreement on values and ideals, one man's order would be another's disorder, and vice versa...
...It all depends it seems on whose political ox is being gored...
...But just as soon as the title of the course was changed to "Social Disorganization," without any change in content, students flocked to it in such numbers that it had to be given in several sections...
...They are even more in evidence in popular thought about the world of human affairs...
...In part, the attractiveness of the theme flows from the same reasons that explain why we never gossip about our neighbor's virtues, but only about their vices...
...This unhistorical perspective and its absolutist pronouncements on the shortcomings of American culture are accentuated by a double standard of morality in the making of comparative political judgments...
...In the first case we resent the exercise of power as invading our autonomy...
...Since 1929, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reports, government spending on all levels has grown thirty-fold...
...I_~gically the position is self-defeating and incoherent, but that hasn't prevented the uncritical-minded from being infected, first with a wholesale skepticism about the possibility of historical truth, and finally with an irresponsible and inconsistent dogmatism...
...It is a postulate concerning the moral equality of men and women, regardless of their physical and intellectual differences...
...First, the fact that after the Second World War, the United States withdrew its armed forces from Europe while the Red Army bestrode the continent like a colossus...
...How often have we heard not only from the pundits of the press, television, radio, and other pulpits, but in universities, that science and scientists were responsible for the use of the atomic bomb...
...The disorder that we should all deplore in our time is largely the consequence of the erosion of these values and ideals, and the resulting abandonment of rational processes of debate, the resort to means that subvert the moral and legal ends of a free society, and the emergence not only of cults of violence but of attitudes that encourage resort to violence and to threats of violence...
...Anti-intellectualism and irrationalism are not restricted to popular thinking about scientific and natural affairs...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
