SCIENTISTS AT SEA TOO
Netboy, Anthony
Scientists At Sea Too THE MARCH OF MEDICINE, Columbia University Press. $2. Reviewed by Anthony' Netboy THESE LECTURES, delivered to laymen in 1943 at the New York Academy of Medicine, offer...
...Thrust into groups, man becomes "truculent and overbearing and smashes himself and his fellows en masse in war and strife...
...Robert R. Williams, chemical director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, discussing "Nature and Man," finds the roots of war in man's loss of individualism—the "swamping of self-help by state help," and the tendency of the average citizen to become a robot moved at will by autocratic rulers...
...later it will depend on enlightened social conscience which knows no barriers—economic, linguistic, or racial...
...What a social cortex is, or might be, is difficult to imagine...
...The intensity of aggressiveness, he notes, varies among men of different cultures, and furthermore killing is not the only manifestation of aggressiveness...
...Franz Alexander, director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, in his paper on "Aggressiveness" denies that the innate aggressiveness of man leads to war...
...Williams looks with horror on all social aggregates: "Organizations of either capital or labor are equally artificial and contrary to nature and should be subordinated...
...Reviewed by Anthony' Netboy THESE LECTURES, delivered to laymen in 1943 at the New York Academy of Medicine, offer convincing evidence that even scientists, normally so sure of their social views, are confused about the meaning and causes of war...
...Once the social cortex takes command new patterns of behavior will emerge, new social systems will arise...
...Some of the essays in this book are interesting and important, such as Dr...
...In short, peace is also compatible with human nature, and the belligerent impulses of man can be diverted into constructive channels...
...World peace," he concludes, "at first must be based on both justice and armed foroe...
...That the social organism is a global affair is just beginning to penetrate our social cortex...
...The significant thing, developmentally speaking," she says, "is that we can't quite get rid of the old, primitive idea that we must fight wars over geographical boundaries, even now when geographical boundaries no longer mean anything...
...But for the most part, the reader comes away with a , conviction that doctors, psychiatrists, criminologists, and peripatetic members of Parliament like Sir Norman Angell (who contributed a paper on planning for peace) are as much at sea about the way to curb and cure man's war-making instinct as you and I are...
...And so it goes...
...Dr...
...Alexander moves off terra firma when faced with the question: How can war be eradicated...
...Myrtle McGraw, an authority on child psychology, is more optimistic than Drs...
...Alexander and Williams, but she is equally vague about the methods of eliminating man's lust for war...
...All of this is logical enough, but Dr...
...Edgar Erskine Hume's paper on the contributions of medicine to war...
...Dr...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 18
