The Ideologically Naked
SCHWARTZ, HARRY
The Ideologically Naked Democracy Is Not Enough. By John Scott. Harcourt. Brace. 186 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Harry Schwartz Russian affairs expert, New York "Times" ONE OF THE remarkable...
...For too many of us the brotherhood of man has degenerated into a glorification of the rugged individual and his ability to acquire and keep more material goods than the neighbor he does not love...
...To support his thesis, Scott presents the sights, sounds and smells of most of the world...
...Scott's main thesis is simple: In the great bulk of underdeveloped countries, those where per capita income is under $200 annually and the literacy rate below 50 per cent, democracy as we know it cannot work and some form of "limited and temporary authoritarianism is a necessity...
...He does a superb job in this, and his book would be valuable if only as a brief, readable and intelligent introduction to the modern world...
...Scott, of course, is not blind to the non-economic aspects of the problems the "revolution of rising anticipations" now poses...
...Consider, for example, this harsh—but, unfortunately, accurate—description of our society with which Scott closes his book: "We are overfed, overindulged egocentrics...
...As an aside it should be mentioned that his book on those experiences, Behind the Urals, is by now a classic for anyone who wants to know what Stalinist industrialization was really like, and it is a pity no enterprising publisher has seen fit to reprint, perhaps in paperback form, that very important volume...
...We have contrived a series of deals with pseudo-truth which has left us bloated with food and drink but ideologically naked...
...Now John Scott—assistant to the publisher of Time—has published a book which once again makes clear that some of the most important and fundamental thinking about the current problems of our society is being done in the Rockefeller Center skyscraper where Time, Life and Fortune are written and edited...
...All in all, it is a book worth reading and thinking about...
...It was the same answer Nikita Khrushchev gave Siberian workers last fall at Bratsk when they interrupted his speech with demands for lower prices for consumer goods...
...And he has brought to his travels the inquiring mind and the economic and political sophistication of a man who began his adult life as a worker at Magnitogorsk in the harshest days of Soviet industrialization during the 1930s...
...It has been his good fortune to be able to visit and study perhaps more of the world than any other current journalist...
...But Scott's main concern in this provocative and intelligent volume is not so much our sins as the problem posed by the mass of humanity now politically and economically awakened for the first time in modern history...
...We are pampered, petulant, and selfish individualists, suspended in a state Reinhold Niebuhr calls 'sophisticated vulgarity.' We are unwilling to implement the ritual we mouth on Sundays and share with our neighbors...
...How are they trying, in Walt Rostow's terminology, to create the prerequisites for an industrial civilization in order to make their transition successfully, with least cost to themselves and to us, the "overfed, overindulged egocentrics...
...His book correctly predicted the violence which has now taken place in South Africa and he makes an eloquent plea for the United States to act—as it has now begun to do in connection with the recent Sharpeville killings—to prevent the world from turning into two hostile camps, one of the rich white oppressors, the other of the oppressed but numerically superior non-whites...
...The essential reason is that the prime function of government in these countries is to make possible that "primitive accumulation of capital" of whose horrors in the early 19th century England Marx wrote so graphically and whose similar deprivation today no population will undergo voluntarily...
...How are these hundreds of millions in the Hungry World now breaking the bonds of the traditional society...
...And he has some drastic solutions for the Arab-Israeli conflict...
...The scorn so many in our intelligentsia tend to exhibit toward publications such as Life and Time is hard to square with the important contributions to our national thinking made recently by the books of Thomas Griffiths, Emmet Hughes and Max Ways...
...Reviewed by Harry Schwartz Russian affairs expert, New York "Times" ONE OF THE remarkable features of recent public discussion in this country is the high quality and mercilessness of the contributions to our current national self-criticism made by persons high in Henry Luce's journalistic empire...
...He could have cited Wladyslaw Gomulka's 1957 statement that if the wage demands of the Polish workers were granted Poland would have no hope of moving ahead economically...
...He cites Aneurin Bevan's statement that "a great deal of the capital aggregations that we are at present enjoying are the results of the wages that our fathers went without...
Vol. 43 • April 1960 • No. 17
