A Reader's Notebook
BELL, DANIEL
A READER'S NOTEBOOK By Daniel Bell The New Societies And Two Cultures The New Society. In New York City the other week, Harry Van Arsdale, President of the local AFL-CIO Council, announced that...
...It is good that the Komsomols are troubled...
...A clever, dialectical answer...
...as Reinhold Niebuhr once put it, is an eternally recurring and disturbing one...
...They suck young fellows into their company and you can see how slimy they make them...
...It appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda as an extract from the minutes of a discussion at an engineering works in Dnepropetrovsk: YURI YESKOV (electrician): Surely under Communism we won't have to live with egoists, hypocrites, toadies, careerists, thieves and drunkards, will we...
...But some Komsomols have been worrying recently about some nasty habits which seem to keep cropping up in the "New Soviet Man...
...this is the path to knowledge and sophistication...
...In New York City the other week, Harry Van Arsdale, President of the local AFL-CIO Council, announced that the trade unions were planning to build a number of hospitals for their members because labor was dissatisfied with the services of Blue Cross...
...When the first atom bomb in human history was exploded at Los Alamos, in fact, Oppenheimer recited a passage from the Hindu epic: "If the radiance of a thousand suns/ were to burst into the sky,/ that would be like/ the splendour of the Mighty One...
...I was particularly fascinated by a comment of Bertrand Russell in the August issue of Encounter, which had previously published the lecture...
...The second thought is about the logical nature of the argument, for if Russell's grandfather did not know of the invention of the power loom, the "bridges" were then—as now—already one-way routes...
...Withdraw those circumstances which tend to create crime in the human character, and crime will not be created," Robert Owen once wrote...
...All I can say," said Dr...
...Perhaps the question of "sources of evil survivals" in the perfect state of Communism is one that Khrushchev might welcome for discussion in the cultural exchange program...
...The Utopian Socialists used to argue that environment and environment alone determines character...
...William E. Bohn used to tell me that his grandfather fought against Napoleon at Waterloo...
...The Sense of Time Eclipsed...
...So far as I have been able to discover, his invention of the power loom remained unknown to my grandfather...
...The problem of "moral man in immoral society...
...Cartwright, who invented the power loom, was my grandfather's tutor and taught him to construe the odes of Horace...
...Go to the market, he said, "and just see how many loafers, profiteers and spongers there are...
...Arnold A. Karan, Association President, "is that organized labor is disassociating itself from the rest of society to take care of its own group and leaving the expensive but humane job of taking care of the poor and indigent up to someone else...
...But why, one may ask, were these young fellows so susceptible to corruption...
...In his dialectical discourse before the National Press Club, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev remarked that just as feudalism (the thesis) had been replaced by capitalism (the antithesis), so, now, the inevitable next higher stage (the synthesis) would be Communism...
...The New Society, Not So New...
...I don't think that Cartwright knew Sanskrit...
...Perhaps he and Niebuhr might lead a joint seminar...
...YEVGENY KHANILO (mill-tender): We're always talking about survivals of the past...
...But how do they acquire them, fellows who were born long after Socialism had been established...
...Surely not...
...In the time of Charles II," Russell wrote, the separation of science and culture "did not exist and in the early 19th century there were still many bridges from one territory to the other...
...Young Khanilo was answered by Vasily Vodnikov, an electrician, who pointed out that "capitalism still exists in the world and makes its influence felt...
...What strikes one at first is the nearness of the living generations to the past, since Cartwright won the patents for his invention in 1785-1788...
...ABRAM VENGEROVSKY (winder): Well, somehow we'll be delivered of these survivals of the past...
...The Hospital Association's reply provided an interesting, if unwitting, commentary on labor's place in the affluent society...
...The Moscow correspondent of the New Statesman and Nation recently reported a discussion of some ethical problems raised in Russia by the transition from socialism to Communism...
...I don't know how many scientists today know Horace, but one of the sources of J. Robert Oppenheimer's fame is his knowledge, in the original tongue, of the Bhagavad Gita...
...In England, the Reith lecture of Sir Charles Snow on "The Two Cultures," i.e., the separation of science from the humanities, has provoked considerable discussion...
...Did their fathers teach them to drink vodka and use foul language, carry knives and act like rowdies...
Vol. 42 • October 1959 • No. 37
