Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial" WHEN THE STENTORIAN voice of science speaks, a deep, rolling thunder lumbers out of the heavens and most Americans piously bow their heads. It is a stunning show of compliance that has left many an...
...Alas, despite the prodigies of science many Americans of influence and prestige still cling to the benighted notion that, with a little social engineering here, a little fine tuning there, man will become something other than the dangerous rascal that our Founding Fathers remonstrated against and our Constitution endeavors to preserve us from...
...And we have this rule from no less irrefragable an authority than the American Anthropological Association...
...In fact today there are more organizations of petty grumblers than ever before...
...So why is it that reformers and revolutionaries alike show such insouciance to the doctors of anthropology...
...They were not sweetened any by the improvements they experienced in the 1960s...
...Man endures...
...I bequeath this polemical strategy to iy brothers and sisters in the extreme 'ings of the ecology and consumer move-tents and pass on...
...He really believes what he writes...
...why should they be cheered by Professor Galbraith's more extravagant schemes...
...And why do businessmen keep extolling progress, growth, and so forth...
...They remained unchanged...
...from depression to the highest median income in the world...
...Their noisy presence mocks the meliorist promises of both the pulpiteers of reform and the heralds of revolution...
...Well, with all due respect I offer them a chorus of raspberries and a symphony of guffaws...
...New Republic subscribers go on subscribing to The New Republic though through all of its pages howl the commotions of Jeremiah...
...This is a century that saw Americans move from Jim Crow to the various civil rights laws of the 1960s...
...He and his readers are genuinely fetched by the hope that what they call a "fundamental change in the system" will bring about a mellowing of its bilious inhabitants...
...It is the awe of automobile salesmen, and politicians now resort to the certitudes of science ("political science") with an increasing frequency that is at once an indication of their acuity and a reminder of their talent for mischief...
...Nevertheless whites are as grumpy as ever, and, if anything, blacks have become even grouchier...
...And a brief consideration of some of these modest changes proves how right the anthropologists have been...
...As he pointed out in our June issue, "If you look carefully at the 1970 census, looking at the hard objective data of the dozen years between 1960 and 1972, you will see more social and economic progress in this country than has ever been seen before...
...desegration, jobs, housing, and education are impressive . . . you can go from income to housing, to the kinds of goods we own, to what kind of houses we live in, to where we live, to the number of washers, dryers, automobiles—all the things that have really come to represent middle class life in America—and you find that in the last dozen years Americans have achieved in large measure what I have called this massive majority middle-class...
...through it all man adapts...
...In material terms and with regard to the lower forms of personal freedom, Americans today are better off than ever before, but are they different from_ their ancestors, are they happier or more satisfied...
...It is one of the salient qualities distinguishing man from the pterodactyl of yore—he adapts...
...The soberig rule is that man adapts...
...Let his friends in the animal kingdom evolve into brutes the size of Oldsmobiles, possessed of humors that would shock even Congresswoman Abzug, and he huddles with his colleagues waiting for an opportunity to strike a multitude of puny blows whose influence is, in the aggregate, mortal and a prelude to lunch...
...It is a stunning show of compliance that has left many an evangelist perspiring with envy...
...ellow liberals take note: there are con.adic,tions in our noble movement...
...Let blizzards pelt him and ages of ice engulf him...
...Modern man is in trouble, and only a dramatically changed society will make him lovely again...
...We halved the poverty rate...
...In the American Republic the citizenry slogs on under one ridiculous Congress after another...
...and from two world wars and two limited wars to a period of peace, yet Americans have adapted to these improvements and once again they are grousing...
...Let an unfriendly sun scorch the flora and fauna from his presence...
...He is a quack, attired as a charlatan, trained as a mountebank, and aspiring to be an impostor...
...Wattenberg is indubitably correct...
...neither fundamental change nor the more modest changes of the 1960s overcame man's ability to adapt...
...Why do politicians harangue us with their rosy tales...
...They lived through the Depression...
...In America if one can speak from an ambience of test tubes and slide rules, in a language full of statistics and jargon, one has an inside track to the pocketbook of every semi-educated Iunkhead in the land...
...I take my stand with the anthropologists...
...Franklin was able to live with Eleanor, and Ladybird endured Lyndon...
...The strides made in civil rights and in actual black economic progress and in black social progress in terms of integration...
...For my part I proudly side with the anthropologists...
...The voice of :fence exhorts all enlightened Americans sit on their hands...
...Edward Banfield tells us that in the 1960s white income rose by 69 percent and black income rose by 100 percent...
...No matter how devastating Professor Galbraith's plans for America might be, I am confident Americans will adapt...
...They have made the adaptions demanded by affluence and the freedom to degenerate, and they are as miserable as ever...
...For many years these diligent students of mankind have continued to elaborate on one simple truth, to wit, man's enduring ability to adapt to changing physical conditions...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Still there seem to be many highly influential Americans who doubt its validity, and their tardiness at facing up to the consequences of this anthropological axiom puzzles me...
...Yet Americans seem to be just as dissatisfied with their lot as ever before...
...Perhaps they drink the same mysterious stuff that so besotted philosophical inebriates like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and—bringing it all back home—the dope McGovern...
...Come New Deals and Great Societies, come abominations like the New American Revolution, and still the common folk pay through the nose...
...Perhaps the most authoritative chronicler of the improvements that have bedeviled Americans in the past decade is Ben J. Wattenberg, author of the recently published book The Real America...
...they lived through the Nixonian glory...
...Why do supposedly intelligent men tell us we shall find salvation in fundamental change...
...What makes the busybodies so frantic...
...Not at all...
...either the fundamental change of ProIssor Galbraith nor the milder tonics rescribed by his more moderate col-)agues can change mankind...
...How unfortunate...
...Banfield also tells us that housing is better and "consumption of it more than doubled in real per capita terms between 1950 and 1970...
...Obviously the same creature that adapted so suavely to the Ice Age can adapt to progress,-affluence, and the idiot notion, equality...
...he grows hair and burrows deeper into his cave...
...Bah, to fundamental change, and bah again to Professor Galbraith...
...It is a gross misreading of the historical record, a blasphemy before science, an atrocity—for it comes from a doctor of philosophy...
...The dozen years from 1960 to 1972 have witnessed unsurpassed social and economic progress, but they have also seen the rise of Mr...
...nevertheless they all seem adamantinely confident that a dramatic restructuring of our environment will make man into something sweeter than he is, will make him into something other than the perpetual grumbler, the timeless flummoxer, the jackass of the Old Testament...
...For years I have heard Professor John Kenneth Galbraith deliver up such dire notifications, and for years I thought he was only trying to peddle his books, but I have come to the conclusion he is in earnest...
...Yet still there are those busybodies who exhort us to improve ourselves, and some even want to go beyond a modest reform...
...Ice Ages come and Ice Ages go...
...Men can put up with practically anything, and basically they remain unchanged...
...all its writers simmer in frustration and gloom...
...Galbraith, a consumerist lobby, a women's lobby, an ecology lobby, a homosexual lobby, a student lobby, and countless other blossomings of organized malevolence...
...Society is in need of fundamental change," they say...
...he pulls his threadbare rag across his bony chest and plods submissively onward...
...The bill may take on the dimensions of a brontosaurus, yet they merely huddle together and await their chance...
...They would present a more dignified and intelligent spectacle groveling before the thrones ofscience than ignoring the historical record...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
