A Shortage of Brains
Rovere, Richard H.
A Shortage of Brains by RICHARD H. ROVERE Tn the first half-century of The Progressive's existence, the United States grappled—successfully for the most part, it seems to me—with the problem of so...
...It is observable in the lively arts, in journalism, in education at the lower and middle reaches, and here and there in higher education...
...We have also helped many others who located elsewhere—in fact in some cases we have suggested sites on other lines as better suited to their particular needs...
...Since the end of World War II, we have helped over 1200 firms to find suitable sites on the C&O...
...Those who describe the needs are generally not lacking in plans for satisfying them...
...I doubt very much, however, if we can much improve the general quality of our civilization by applying any or all of them...
...I am not sure that history offers any examples of this (there have, after all, been so few societies that have even achieved freedom and justice), but it is certainly possible in theory, and a good many critics have said in recent years that we are well on the way toward proving the theory...
...We open up new frontiers, from the subconscious mind to outer space, and the need for guides and explorers multiplies...
...Junk it must be, and junk there must be throughout our society, for even if we get many better teachers we shall have need, for our experiment in universal education carried to higher and higher levels, for millions more whose qualifications are next to non-existent...
...Only our requirements are on the increase...
...And this, I think, we are beginning to see in many fields...
...I believe this to be the case, and I should like to advance, tentatively, a rather melancholy theory of the mass society or at least of one of its problems...
...The problems of a mass society— and I have mentioned only one of them—may very well prove to be ultimately insoluble...
...fine teachers who might be in a classroom if teaching paid better than typing...
...He is the author of a book soon to be published on the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...we can get better men in public life if we make politics an honored profession and convince our gifted young men of the respectability and opportunity of a government career...
...Glanville Williams, in The Sanctity of Life, reported on some measurements taken in England over the past few years that seem to show an annual decline of one point per year, on a scale of about one hundred and seventy-five, in the average intelligence...
...Our strength as a nation thrusts upon us a leading role in the world, and we need, as never before, hordes of specialists—linguists, historians, engineers, economists, and heaven knows what else...
...We can get better scientists, they will tell us, if we have better schools and stop harassing the scientists we have...
...They had to be fought for and forced by political means, but there were few people then who thought that such adjustments were beyond the realm of the possible, which is a definition of politics...
...If the Friday Afternoon Mail, whose editors may not be the choos-iest of men to begin with, should find that this week they haven't a thing but junk to put in their magazine, they cannot simply skip the issue...
...we can get more and better teachers if we pay more for their services and give teachers the place of respect in the community to which the value of their services entitles them...
...The problem runs across the whole of our society, which by the very terms of its achievement Somewhere in this country there is a spot that is exactly right for your next plant...
...And it seems to me to require no demonstration that if our demand for, say, psychiatrists rises materially above the supply of potentially capable ones, the quality of performance everywhere must decline—if for no other reason than that the standards of those who train them would have to be lowered to accommodate the incompetents...
...Our affluence, our almost universal literacy, and the complexity of our organization create requirements of every kind over and above those that are simply a consequence of population growth...
...It is this way throughout all publishing...
...first-rate teachers...
...But this is a suspicion, not knowledge—and this magazine can bear witness to the number of things beyond the realm of the possible that have in time been brought within it...
...its editors need that many books to occupy their time...
...embryo physicists who might be flushed out of machine shops by scholarship programs...
...We pay more and more attention to our health and need more and more doctors and medical researchers...
...Eisenhower or by some ad hoc committee of college presidents...
...How we work with you is more fully described in a new booklet, which also lists a number of selected sites...
...If it can find only 50 good ones, it must fill out its list with 25 that are not good...
...It is unthinkable that Boswell House should trim its schedule merely because of a shortage of worthwhile manuscripts...
...Now the grim fact that keeps coming to my mind is that just as there is a limit to a country's supply of natural resources, there is a limit to its supply of human resources...
...We need more scientists, we need better trained scientists...
...A Shortage of Brains by RICHARD H. ROVERE Tn the first half-century of The Progressive's existence, the United States grappled—successfully for the most part, it seems to me—with the problem of so ordering an industrial society as to achieve a rough social and economic justice for the various classes, or interests, that comprise it...
...This is a service organization...
...But a society can be free and just in its social arrangements, affluent in its economy, and at the same time mediocre or worse as a civilization...
...We have all become accustomed, over the last decade, to hearing some politician or publicist explain the desperate need for manpower, or better manpower, in some specialized and, by their accounts, neglected field...
...Eugenics and other devices may offer ways of increasing the supply or of making better use of what we have, but it is a hard, observable truth of existence that intelligence is unevenly distributed, and it is also a hard, observable truth that the supply, in relative terms, is not now on the increase...
...it has contracted with printers for that much printing...
...It stands to reason, it seems to me, that one profession's gain must be in almost every case another's loss...
...In many fields, certainly in the arts, a Gresham's Law operates...
...It cannot perhaps be sure of a market for that many of its books, but it is an institution, a producer, and the machinery it has developed cannot be used to maximum efficiency with less than that volume...
...We invite you to write for a copy...
...there are doubtless village-Hampdens to be found this side of the grave and be sworn in as Secretaries of the Navy...
...We come increasingly under the rule of law, increasingly interdependent, and increasingly litigious—and we need more lawyers...
...we need more good men in public life...
...and the very notion of its organization makes heavier demands each day for what we may describe as intellectual goods and services—work, in other words, that requires the use of a trained intellect...
...I should be most happy to learn that the theory lacks merit...
...we need more teachers, we need more RICHARD ROVERE is Washington correspondent for The New Yorker...
...Still, I cannot escape the conclusion that if Paul is to be paid, Peter must be robbed...
...We become increasingly literate and require an ever larger number of people to satisfy the various kinds of demands—from comic books onward and upward with the arts—that literate people develop...
...Social mobility and political freedom have been maintained and in some ways strengthened, and we have achieved a decent approach to economic equality...
...The worth of these remedies I do not for a moment dispute...
...Our job is to help you find it...
...I say "in almost every case" because I am sure there are some untapped sources of manpower...
...For what was called for then was really nothing more than a rationalization of social procedures, a series of mechanical adjustments in society...
...Moreover, we need them for export as well as for domestic consumption...
...It has hired salesmen on the basis of that figure...
...No matter...
...Now Boswell House, if it is lucky, may have a chance to publish, in 1959, 50 books that anyone of taste and discrimination could regard as an enrichment of American civilization...
...For if we are to get more people or more good people for science or education or government, we have to get them from somewhere, and this somewhere is the source of manpower for all our enterprises...
...Five million readers are waiting to curl up with it—and five million dollars worth of business might never be done if it were never circulated...
...We only begin to describe our needs when we speak of scientists, teachers, and public servants...
...The greater fear is of an absolute decline in the quality of the culture we now have...
...We become more enlightened about crime and penology— and our enlightenment creates a need for thousands of skilled personnel...
...Our services are available without cost to any business which is considering a new location...
...What I fear is not simply a failure to move forward at a pace recommended by some commission chosen by Mr...
...Boswell House, let us say, is set up to publish 75 books a year...
...This is, as I said at the outset, a melancholy thesis—and if it is true that we are putting intolerable burdens on our human resources, then the prospect this affords is a good deal bleaker than that faced by thoughtful, humane, liberal Americans a half-century ago...
...The process is a fairly simple one which I can most easily describe by speaking of a field I know—publishing...
...If I am right thus far, the most terrible consequences are not to be reckoned only in terms of those things that have lately been so much in the headlines: the missile lag, the need for more physicists, the want of more efficient public administration...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
