LETTERS
Editors: So much in Edward Speyer's article, "Scientists in A Bureaucratic Age" [DISSENT, Summer 1957] is merely implied, so many half-truths are only half voiced, that it is difficult to...
...All this, of course, is no excuse...
...And as Mr...
...Speyer is aware...
...There are the advertising copy writers, the intellectuals working for the slicks, the PhD economists in market research...
...The question which divides us is whether to be quiet about it or not...
...Social life in this country is a permanent conspiracy against truth...
...But there are many more scientists now than in the good old (love and string and sealing wax) days...
...They also claim that History may not repeat itself, yet totalitarianism was the first which procertain characteristic features which arise ceeded to remake the past...
...The answer is that faculties pursue their age-old function of teaching and scholarship...
...There are, no doubt, many more scientists now who are not interested in the search for truth, but this is not because of who the scientists have become, but who have become scientists...
...It is true that more money than ever before is coming from the AEC, the military, and other government agencies, but on the whole these men are working on the projects they would have liked to work on but couldn't have without the money...
...We learn from experiences such as those of Oppenheimer...
...Moreover, the MarComing back to the article, I would quis de Custine, who went to Russia in like to draw attention to the passage 1839 as a fellow-traveler of Czarism, and where Coser and Howe wrote that if a was transformed by what he saw into its Beria is one day a hero and next day enemy, made the point that the pattern a villain this may be not unusual, but of behavior and action which he describthat by the third day he does not exist ed and which we find connected with 200 Stalinism was already clearly referred to by earlier authors...
...Saletan thinks "one can hardly blame the scientists...
...Science and scientists are deeply imbedded in our present society, and to expect them to act in ways which are not of our world is nonsense...
...Historical thinking has given us (as Croce put it) the affirmation that life and reality are history and history alone...
...The fact is that they can no longer rise above any...
...Whoever is not a dupe is considered a traitor...
...I wonder who is doing more damage to society...
...But doing that is not as heartless as remaining silent...
...We are dealing, he says, with "primarily a social disease...
...Saletan's letter shows, one cannot speak out without belaboring those afflicted...
...Saletan should be outraged, not at my article, but at the things he himself describes...
...Saletan says that it is the young scientists "who are not interested in the search for truth...
...This does not disprove the analysis of Stalinism as a system given by Coser and Howe, nor does it simply that the past has remained intact...
...Saletan prepared to show that this social disease is a disease of the young...
...I have the impression that there is a fair ly random distribution of cynicism with age...
...Russia — 1839 Editors: Lewis Coser and Irving Howe discuss the nature of Stalinism in "The Role of Ideology" [DISSENT, Autumn 1957.] Though I concur with their analysis in its essential points, I should like to raise one question...
...Finally, and not at all to be underestimated, is the intelelctual climate in which the young scientist has been brought up...
...For a long time I shared the view that Stalinism, being historically a creation of our times, had given birth to most of its devices, since these could be understood only in the framework of the system which was itself intelligible only in the historical environment in which it arose...
...One may ask to what extent those physicists working in the universities are sinning...
...Take, for instance, his paragraph about the prostitution of science...
...Change is accompanied by scene more than a century ago by the continuity...
...From Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie, Paris, 1989...
...One is outraged at being called ditry names by Mr...
...In fact, if scientists actually are prostituting themselves as a group, Mr...
...The treatment of the disease begins by speaking out...
...It must be understood, however, that a large number have refused military and even government work, and that most of the best are still on the campuses pursuing the search for truth and beauty...
...Intent Soviet institutions were the continua• deed, each of the quotations given below tion of Russian institutions of long stand-could stem from a contemporary report ing...
...To expect scientists, 198 unlike other intellectuals, to provide leadership is just silly...
...God makes the future...
...but it may remind us of the considerable role that traditional features of Russian society have played in the formation of Stalinism...
...Of this, Mr...
...They believe that to be disciplined means to be civilized...
...those who recognize the symptoms in a member of their own family have a moral obligation to urge remedial treatment...
...We are also the most vulnerable, for it is the physicists that the military is propositioning with the most lucrative rewards...
...Yet, history is also transition and transmission, and this we tend to forget, perhaps, because historical thinking as it came to us from the 19th century was tainted with the idea of progress and change promised progress...
...For better or worse, this means choosing marriage over the high earnings of prostitution, and is rather surprising in view of our "restricting way of looking at the world...
...Making outin the formative period of a society not standing people non-existent and rewritonly linger on but become engraved ing the past was, however, called a reupon social life and permeate all further markable feature of Russia's political development...
...It is here that the social character of prostitution enters the picture...
...M. R. was disgraced two years ago and for two years Russia has not heard his name pronounced, that name which previously was in everybody's mouth...
...Every accident is here treated as an Affair of State...
...I am a physicist...
...Speyer should not be surprised...
...If they were, it would probably be offered only by the very people whom Mr...
...In Russia the tyranny of despotism is a permanent revolution...
...Though we had learned from Marx that changes in the socio-economic base do not aways change the entire-superstructure and that ideologies may persist after the circumstances which created them have disappeared, we have tended 199 to underestimate the power of tradition...
...Nobody dares remember him, nobody dares believe in his life—not his present life, but his past life...
...Many others, with a presumably broader view of the world, are doing the same...
...Others, like so many intellectuals, are wandering (or even walking) the streets, and still other are just sitting on their hands doing what is easiest...
...If they can ever take revenge for their real inferiority, they will make us cruelly expiate our advantages...
...It may also draw attention to the extent to which Stalinism in Russia has been a counterrevolution...
...Many scientists who are aware of the social implications of their work are doing what they can...
...leadership is not silent...
...Of these, many are working on the kind of project it is hard not to disapprove of...
...This is more like rolling drunks than like prosttution...
...One can hardly blame the scientists as a group if they are engaging in the same sin as other intellectuals...
...In a recent survey published in Physics Today it was found that 81 per cent of PhD physicists prefer working for a university, and that 40 per cent prefer industry...
...I know about physicists only...
...For this, they must have common goals and must be the kind of people who take to leadership...
...Saletan mistakenly attributes to me awareness of the "fact" that scientists can no longer rise above the level of official politics...
...Actually scientists as a group, true scientists still interested in the search for "truth and beauty," have managed to maintain their integrity to an extent much greater than have many other intellectuals...
...Saletan has misaddressed his...
...The original paper by Lee and Yang on parity nonconservation was published with the following note: "Work supported in part by the U.S...
...But when one puts it in the proper perspective of the society in which it functions, it may become a reason...
...This is precisely because we have refused to be led, have chosen to act as individuals interpreting the truth as we see it...
...HENRY JACOBY • Russian despotism not only has no regard for ideas and sentiments, but it remakes facts, struggles against the evidence— and wins the struggle...
...We like to think of ourselves as the poets of science, "dedicated" in a more genuine sense than the poets of Madison Avenue...
...Atomic Energy Commission...
...The leadership, such as it is, comes silently from the true "geniuses...
...And the ultimate refusal to become a prostitute is also silent...
...In his Short History of Russia Marquis de Custine, as the following B. H. Sumner once showed to what ex-extracts* from his letters will show...
...Mr...
...But the volume of scientific workers produced since the war includes not only "geniuses" but also hacks...
...Although he starts off by not blaming "scientists as a group," Mr...
...Saletan will discover if he looks that he and I are not so different from a great many others, both inside and outside of science, in our view of the Amazing Marriage...
...Enlightened thought on prostitution has it that it is primarily a social disease...
...must be called new...
...Is Mr...
...After all, he finds science an "often narrow and restricting way of looking at the world...
...Thus, political creation, even if it was change for the worse, still gave ground for hope that similar action carried out with different means could serve a better cause...
...This with a salary difference of $2,000, roughly 20 per cent...
...Saletan and I, it seems, are in fairly good agreement on the facts, but he is "outraged" at the interpretation I put on them (even though in one or two places he uses what seem to me more infuriating formulations than I would use) . Nonetheless, Mr...
...Diseases are treated...
...To remain silent, as Mr...
...EUGENE J. SALETAN EDWARD SPEYER REPLIES: Mr...
...Just what Church and just whose politics are scientists to rise above today...
...There are doubtless many scientists who lack moral integrity, and many others who lack curiosity...
...It almost seems as though it is the scientists who are using the government...
...the Emperor remakes the past...
...M. R. governed the Empire...
...Speyer most fears, the Deans of Science, the organizers, the report writers...
...Editors: So much in Edward Speyer's article, "Scientists in A Bureaucratic Age" [DISSENT, Summer 1957] is merely implied, so many half-truths are only half voiced, that it is difficult to know where to start taking issue...
...Saletan seems to think proper, does not measure up to the situation...
...No doubt, Stalinism is unique—as of course every historical phenomenon is— but did those schemes it has made use of and the attitudes it has displayed arise exclusively from within its own system...
...It is also partly the fault of our educational institutions, which have often given a man a degree that states he has had a university education, when he has had merely a vocational one...
...There is a need for protesting letters and speeches, but Mr...
...There remains, however, the question of the extent to which the accusation is true...
...Does not their analysis attribute to Stalinism a creative power greater than historically justified once all facts are considered...
...on travel in Russia...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
