Man's Advocate
Shafer, Boyd C.
Man's Advocate Who Speaks For Man? by Norman Cousins. Macmillan. 318 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Boyd C. Shafer NORMAN COUSINS' personal experience with men from Germany to Japan and his personal...
...If the question be raised that world federation is Utopian, it may well be that Cousins underestimates national prejudices and vested power interests...
...At the same time he cries, "The issue is not whether one side can impose its will on the other, but how we can keep both sides from fusing inside an atomic oven...
...The alternative is atomic death...
...As he welds together his editorials in The Saturday Review, he writes with unequaled warmth and cogency...
...Belonging to a nation, man has nations that can speak for him...
...Since this is true, since necessity changes, and since men's abilities are yet unplumbed, men can create the world federation which will bring peace...
...Only thus will men again find freedom and peace, only then will they be able to regain that sovereignty which permits them to act not in response to what some other nation does but in accordance with their own will and ability...
...Beneath the obvious diversities and the bitter power struggles men are of man...
...But in this crisis, he asks, who speaks for man...
...Put these two ideas together and what must be concluded...
...Men must reach for and obtain world government...
...Whether or not Russia comes along, it must be done...
...While Cousins doesn't write about world affairs with the cold logic of a Frederick Schuman or the esoteric cleverness of a D. W. Brogan, he is more effective...
...They must change the UN, now only a group of frightened nations, into a world federation...
...But he has an answer...
...Without false pride he dares to be a spokesman...
...Reviewed by Boyd C. Shafer NORMAN COUSINS' personal experience with men from Germany to Japan and his personal education in the great books are here transformed into passionate advocacy of world federation...
...Belonging to a religion, man has religions that can speak for him...
...Belonging to an economic and social order, man has economic or political orders that can speak for him...
...But belonging to the human race, man is without a spokesman...
...Men must go ahead and build...
...Through his personal pilgrimage on three continents, through his talks with students, ex-soldiers, workers and statesmen, he vividly reveals that men everywhere are fundamentally alike in their search for justice and freedom, peace and security...
...all of the human race are "more alike than different...
...In order to be at home anywhere in the world, I had to forget the things I had been taught to remember . . . my ability to get along with other peoples depended not so much upon my comprehension of the uniqueness of their way of life as upon my comprehension of the things we had in common . . . When you got through comparing notes, you discovered that you were both talking about the same neighborhood, that is, this earth . . ." In this, so far as it goes, he is right, as much modern research in anthropology, psychology, and history proves...
...He perceives what few except Roman Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and 18th Century cosmopolitans like Condorcet have seen...
Vol. 17 • June 1953 • No. 6
