PEACE AND WAR AND THE INTELLECTUALS

...Why don't they...

...Soviet intransigence strengthens American self-justification, and the electorate begins to take pride in its missiles, bombs, Polaris submarines, and the destructive capacity they represent...

...Scientists and engineers, sophisticated in the play of automated war games, use computers to simulate almost all military situations...

...In the case of the scientists and scholars, a choice exists between working on military research, either inside or outside govern, ment, or pursuing research which has no military meaning, while the power of the scientist inside government and the Defense Department grows vastly greater than that of the scientist outside...

...The vast body of the world's research, ranging through the social sciences and the natural sciences to technology and engineering, is now organized, directly or indirectly, by governments to deal with questions and projects whose character is determined by their relevance to political, economic, and, ultimately, military control...

...Unless they are prepared to embrace this mission, they condemn themselves to a history of service to the establishment, whatever the establishment may be...

...Each issue of the Current Digest of Thought on Peace and War lists from four to five hundred items...

...The contrast between this placid acceptance of huge military budgets and the niggardly budget for peace is not only astonishing in its wrong-headedness, but clear as crystal in its total implication...

...The momentum behind the President has been provided not only by the sheer size of the military-industrial complex and the energy of its economic drive, but by the force of a cold war philosophy which controls the American society as a whole...

...One views any dispute between the military and the universities with a gleam of hope that at last the universities may be coming to their senses and refusing to demean their true aims by becoming the instruments of war...

...When we look for encouragement and new grounds for the belief that peace is possible, we find it in the work, in this country and abroad, by scientists and scholars who, on their own initiative, have tackled the practical problems of achieving peace and whose sense of social responsibility has led to the formation of groups for international exchange of ideas like the Soviet-American collaboration of scientists through the Council on Science and World Affairs...

...We do not know because we have not thought enough about them...

...They are committed to political and social values which they have learned to accept through the lives they have led and the social system which has nurtured them...

...This would release each side from the necessity of actually building the weapons systems or of killing millions of people with them, and still provide the militarists and the politicians with games they can play...

...The coordinating agency for doing so already exists in the Peace Research Institute in Washington...

...We already have a fresh body of literature in the new areas of peace-and-war scholarship...

...This ferment is the responsibility and the necessity, not only of writers, but of the univerities, the scientists, and the scholars...

...The only result of the dispute was that the military developed a new organization to deal with the university...

...Yet, as James Baldwin says, "Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves...

...But at the same time we have clung to our decision to renew testing in the atmosphere when, without serious hazard, we could have made a sharp break with the past and set out on a new course of unilateral initiatives...

...To unite the cultures, the immediate task is to bring the full resources of the human mind to bear on the major issues of peace and war...

...Decisions of policy and strategy in relation to peace and war have become so complex and so intermingled with economic, political, scientific, military, and moral factors that they are being made by intellectuals, principally scientists, in and out of uniform...

...In a dispute last year between the military and one of our larger universities, for example, a university research project was revealed to consist of studies of "relative merits of beachheads and airdrop centers, use of big bombers for close infantry battle support, techniques in psychological warfare, obsolescence factors in weapons industries, civil defense requirements, and military factors in economic growth...

...In the United States, in the Soviet Union, in England, in Communist China, in India, there are men in the field of science who have it in their power to work for the solution of the problem of human survival...

...The decision to resume testing bombs in the atmosphere renewed the mood of public acceptance for a policy of nuclear deterrence...

...Other evidence of our will for peace comes from the renewal of American efforts to negotiate seriously with the Russians on disarmament, this time with a detailed plan which can serve as a basis lor solving the practical problems of parity of arms and stability within the military environment...

...In a safer time it was possible to argue that the role of the intellectual could be fulfilled by advancing knowledge on any front, that political decision-making was the responsibility of the electorate, of which the intellectual was simply another member...

...Professor John George Kemeny of Dartmouth, the distinguished mathematician who was a consultant at Los Alamos, has made the brilliant suggestion that when international tension makes war seem imminent, all the relevant data on weapons systems and destructive power be fed into computers, both the attacking and defending sides showing what they can do, and a simulated war be fought, with international referees, the victor to be decided by the computers...

...We may still choose to act, and it is high time we did...

...The intellectual has a responsibility to meet the blind and aggressive attitudes of those committed to the American Right by strong and vigorous statements against the growing national habit of treating the use of reason in international affairs as if it were a sign of softness...

...Until we are prepared to do this, we leave the world's future to the ultras, to the military, to the blind forces of history, to the ideologies, to governments, and to chance...

...The appearance of the government's pamphlet on civil defense shocked a large segment of the university community into realizing that a new situation existed, and that the new situation imposed new responsibilities...

...It is the moral duty of scholars to stay outside narrow ideologies and to join together as internationalists who share a common interest in the invention of new knowledge and in the enhancement of human lives...

...If this were ever true, it is no longer so in the 1960's...

...But where is the evidence of our capacity and our will to bring about disarmament...

...These new institutes could easily be arranged within existing university structures...

...Congress gives voice to the public mood, encourages and creates aggressive attitudes for political profit, and votes to enlarge the military element in national policy...

...most of the same scientists continue to dance to the same martial tunes under a different bandmaster...

...No matter what the field of inquiry—in psychology by-Charles Osgood, in world law by Arthur Larson, in psychiatry by Jerome Frank, in military strategy by Arthur Waskow, in disarmament by Louis Sohn, in the physical sciences by Bernard Feld, in communication by Ithiel Pool, in political science by Richard Snyder, in philosophy by Karl Jaspers—the issues of peace and war cut through the wall between the disciplines and reunite them in new forms...

...Those who speak disparagingly of the college men and women who have been active in the peace movement, and who say that the students act without knowledge on matters which they do not understand, should be required to face the responsible and informed reports which the students have prepared, and to answer student arguments against present deterrence policy...

...How deliberate their disregard of the reality of the problems of real men of real flesh and blood...

...The universities, the major counter-force to naked power and material values, have themselves been seduced by a mixture of money and invitations to patriotic duty, until research budgets for studies of weapons systems, military security, cold war politics, and industrial development occupy major research facilities in the country's institutions...

...It depends upon one's assessment of the seriousness of the present situation and the extent to which one feels morally involved...

...Yet the President's leadership has been stronger in the direction of military strategy than in the achievement of peace and disarmament...

...The American intellectual community need not wait for the formation of international or national research groups by governments...

...There are, of course, ignorant and narrow men of all kinds in the intellectual as in every other community...

...Certainly the reallocation of military contracts can disrupt entire communities, entire cities, entire areas of American society...

...Once the shock of the shelter threat had worn off, many of those who had signed the faculty statements relaxed again, presumably in expectation that the President would lead the nation forward "on a race toward peace...

...There are two new conditions which now exist which never existed before: f The United States government cannot protect its citizens from annihilation in a nuclear war...

...The new circumstances of the present age have changed all that...

...In fact, it is only in recent years that we have had organized intellectual communities emancipated from the control of the church, the state, and the elite...

...They are not dealing with each other as individual men, but as symbols and creatures of systems in which the two key words are not life and death but Communism and anti-Communism...

...Within the university curriculum itself we can establish seminars, study groups, research projects, and research institutes, like the University of Michigan Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, or the Canadian Peace Research Institute to be established at McGill University...

...Yet it is next to impossible to obtain such a budget in the present Congressional mood, in which the public and Congress provide without debate or serious question whatever billions of dollars the Defense Department demands...

...Yet in our country this choice is being forced by a combination of social, political, and economic pressures which HAROLD TAYLOR, author of "On Education and Freedom" and former President of Sarah Lawrence College, is now writing and lecturing on campuses across the country on peace and disarmament issues...

...The President, Defense Secretary Robert Mc-Namara, and Congress have seen to that...

...They should also be prepared to answer the students' question as to why the academic community has not given leadership to the public, as well as to students, in meeting the issues which are currently being raised within American society and the world order...

...We must consider such projects as a World University, on the base of the United Nations, a university whose student body and faculty is world-wide, whose curriculum consists of the world's problems, beginning with the problems of peace and war, whose graduates would be those deeply educated in a world view, free of the parochialism of the nation-state, yet conscious of the meaning of national differences...

...No one, including the Russians, doubts our military capacity...

...During World War II the intellectual resources of the entire country were mobilized on a national scale for war action—for making the bomb, for the Office of Strategic Services, for the Office of War Information, for research and development, for military educational projects...

...The time has come for the members of the American intellectual community to confront themselves bluntly with the issue of war and peace and to come to terms with it...

...When we look for the forces to balance this military posture, we find within the government a Disarmament Agency, with a small staff, a meager budget, and no grand design for its role as a peacemaking agency designed to create imaginative conceptions of new alternatives to military policy...

...But the question of what the intellectual is to do about it is, in the present time, a matter for his personal decision and only indirectly of government policy...

...Until we do, who can believe that we fully intend to rearrange our society to accommodate a serious disarmament policy...

...they could assert that the morality of science demands that the scientist turn all his efforts to saving the human race and creating a richer life for everyone...

...For four hundred years the universities of the Western world have been responsible for collecting and transmitting the history, culture, and knowledge of the world and for acting as a stabilizing, integrating, and creative force in the advancement of knowledge and civilization...

...For the rest of the intellectual community, the choice is not so apparent, but it is equally real...

...The international community of scientists and scholars has no need for such abstractions...

...What is needed is a radical redirection of the kind of research now being carried on and a concern for its relevance to the major issues now affecting the international order...

...We already have precedents for such research and education in the World Health Organization, the International Agency for the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy, and the projects of the United Nations Secretariat...

...They could, if they wished, drop all work on weapons systems and military strategy...

...It is the duty of the intellectual to engage himself in the issues, to open up the area of public debate, to add his voice to the support of intelligent solutions to national problems...

...This dispute, however, was not about the role of the university in peace and war, but about what was referred to by the university as "ethical differences," which turned out to be, in the words of a university spokesman, the "university's responsibility not to touch on decisions, but to do good research" without regard for the conclusions brought about by scientific inquiry...

...The role of the Disarmament Agency seems instead to be that of providing justification for existing policy and data for negotiations which are themselves based on a philosophy of deterrence...

...Until we apply to peace strategy the same concentration of brain power now being applied to military problems, we will not find the solutions we seek...

...Almost the whole of our research in the past has been after the fact, or in explanation of the status quo...

...But what are the activities which move in right directions for right reasons...

...Were we to establish across the country in our colleges and universities centers for the study and discovery of strategies toward peace, we would have a flow of new ideas to match the flow of events and find imaginative solutions to the problems of social change before the conflict such change generates can erupt into violence...

...The President was urged "to lead the nation forward on a race towards peace...

...have now placed our major scientific resources in the hands of the military and government bureaucracy...

...The study of the issues involving peace and war takes the scholar and the student into areas of research in which the combined efforts of natural scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and humanists are necessary to the resolution of the issues, and a new and significant realignment of the traditional disciplines becomes not only possible but necessary...

...This, more than anything else, gives the American citizen a stake in an increased military budget at a time when our problems are not in the last analysis military, but are social, political, economic, and moral...

...How deadly the effect of their dialectic, how tragic the consequences of their mutual disregard of the human...

...What evidence there is comes from studies like those of the economic arrangements which would be necessary in a disarmed America and a disarmed world, studies which have been carried out, first under the initiative of scholars outside government—men like Kenneth Boulding, Emile Benoit, Walter Millis, and Seymour Melman—and more recently by some of these men and others for the Disarmament Agency...

...The two cultures do not separate themselves into knots of scientists who read no Hamlet and humanists who know no science...

...This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility and the necessity of writers...

...In this context, the CP...

...Such a dramatic shift in emphasis would create a fundamental change in our contemporary national attitude...

...We also have the prototype of these international students among our own American youth who have already taken the lead in many of our colleges in tackling issues which range from the race problem, aid to underdeveloped countries, and the Peace Corps, to student research projects and conferences in disarmament and peace strategy...

...Newspaper advertisements opposing the shelter program, signed and paid for by more than 2,000 faculty members in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, stated that the "prodigious energy of our people is being channeled into wrong directions for wrong reasons," and that "such activity prepares the people for the acceptance of thermonuclear war as an instrument of national policy...

...this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes...

...In the field of science and in the arts, it is up to each man to decide what problems he will struggle to solve...

...What a narrow and parochial framework within which to organize human lives and human action...

...He serves as counsel on education for the Peace Research Institute in Washington, is a trustee of the Institute for International Order, and was chairman of the Committee on Peace Research, a group of six scientists he formed to develop peace strategy through research studies...

...These would be scholars and young men and women who would form an international peace corps of an international agency, educated to meet the issues of a new world, ready to take up the task of planning the future in advance of its disasters...

...What a curious pair of concepts with which to shape human destiny...

...The difference between then and now is that the degree of seriousness in the situation is currently greater, the possibility of world destruction is closer...

...But we do not yet have a lull-scale research plan of economic redevelopment for a peacetime economy in the United States...

...The split in Western culture is between that who don't know and don't act, and those who think they know and do act...

...The universities became an integral part of the military system...

...The recent announcement of American-Soviet cooperation in research in outer space holds out new hope that within the international scientific community we will find a place to invent alternatives to cold war competition...

...Nor will the world believe that we are as serious about peace as we are about war...

...We can look to our universities and colleges as centers of research and action for peace...

...Snow "two-culture" thesis of the split between scientists and humanists is trivial rather than illuminating...

...In many instances these students are ahead of the university faculty members, both in the degree of their involvement and the degree of their sophistication in seeking out alternatives to cold war policy are concerned...

...The universities and the intellectual community have been captured by the organized establishment, by governments, and by military-industrial institutions of the Soviet Union and the Western countries...

...The universities and the intellectual community exist to challenge accepted truth and accepted values, to create new conceptions, to stand against the organized establishment, as that part of the social organism which works as the brain and the conscience of the entire enterprise...

...In other words, the issue was not the conversion of the intellect to war-making but simply whether or not the scientist might do his assigned tasks without being badgered by the military hierarchy...

...We must turn to the invention of new alternatives for the solution of problems which, if left to governments and chance, will run their course into mass violence...

...It is not possible to mount a serious, sustained, and powerful research program for peace and disarmament without a budget of at least 100 million dollars and a determination to mobilize the intellectual resources of the country to deal in depth with the issues of peace and war...

...A more immediate plan might be to divert the huge scientific resources of the United States away from an almost total concern with war strategy and its derivatives to disarmament and peace strategy and rearrange the present incredible imbalance of emphasis represented by a fifty-two billion dollar military budget as against a six million dollar disarmament appropriation...