Sketch for a novel
He: inventor of a plan for a single poll tax.
She: invention of a plan for Foundation prizes.
Both are good plans. Satire on the impediment -- human, institutional, physical -- to the adoption of the plans. How the two first are charmed by one another's genius, then gradually fall out, until they become bitter enemies & help destroy one another's plan as visionary, impractical, stupid, selfish, radical, etc. She marries a safe man. He is a "failure" bec. he sticks to his guns to the very end.
1:30 PM
An issue of Diogenes (# 29) just arrived. I. Fichtenau on Medieval polit. morals: the king & his court carried into Christian imagery of God & still persist, particularly in common Catholicism. How much of Christianity wd be lost if it were stripped of these "accidents" of history. Would God etc. in this age be a republican President? His court the Congress? Conversely, are our usage of rule owing to the nature of the Divine rule? Also, are both owing to nature of man? I incline to the last. This problem needs much thought. It relates to the idea that Christ parables should be rephrased in 20th century vocational & moral language. Wd the doctrines disappear. Or only the similes?
Salo Baron writes a needed essay on the balancing of advantages of Jews before & after the so-called emancipation. Generally social psychology & ideology of both Jew & Gentile tend paint somberly the old & gaily the new. Would one rather be a Jew or a Villein (90% of some societies)? Also Baron's attack on Max Weber's declaring the Jewish status that of cast & pariah. Not at all. The Jew could always step up to the baptismal font & be converted.
A foolish article by Alfred Stern on the "Irreversibility of History." Judging hastily from his works & career, one senses a rattle-brained Austrian of marginal intellect and achievements -- a humanist who prospers amid the feeble minds of the humanists. Inter alia "Sartre -- his Philosophy and Psychoanalysis." What a suspicious title! He writes "In a group of nations representing a billion people the reign of the working class has taken over the government from the capitalistic class." What nonsense -- both as to semantics & fact!
I am an existentialist only in my ethic of activity. I believe in the superiority of some goals over others, and in the relative worthwhileness of some people over others. Candor in the face of reality demands acknowledgment that man is most likely to be defeated, now and forever. Optimism is therefore an operational virtue -- much to be encouraged -- for we are not under the compulsions of Sisyphus; it is a necessary attitude because defeat is probable; it also brings more cheer and happiness in the atmosphere of adversity.
Cheerful realism. Yesterday Jill & I searched Trenton stores for old frames to contain the oil paintings of Jess, Vicky and Christopher that Anna Maria just finished. We stopped at the Italo-American market to buy some good foods & obtained a can of prepared sardine sauce, with finocchi, tiny raisins, and the other ingredients of this excellent unusual dish. The Sicilians produced it and love their "pasta con sardi." Even without sardines, the sauce is good. When the fishermen come home without a catch, they eat this "pasta con sardi al mare." "Spaghetti a la sardines -- still-in-the sea!"
New York City, 9 AM, April 6, 1960
Reading: a general collection of English-language poetry, brother Sebastian's "Contemplative Life," a hundred scraps of memoranda, reports, articles, newspapers. One does not read in any standard sense any more. We should [have] as many words for reading as the Eskimoes have for snow. Study, read (for once through without skipping), scan, dip into, glance at, note. Each of these is a separate skilled set of actions; each has its place in scholarship and in affairs. Only a fool reads everything that he wishes to relate to symbolically. An all-or-none habit of reading is post-barbarian but not fully civilized.
Lunch w/ Aaron Bell yesterday. He lives a modest life, compounding intellectual tasks and a few rents into an income ordinarily sufficient. Amiable and most intelligent, as always. We talked of the problems of translations in social science. I asked him to prepare a brief memorandum on uncovering the ranking works in other countries through interviews and questionnaire. He spoke regretfully of the uncontrolled & voluminous flow of material coming into his house. I described to him an ideal system whereby an Aaron Bell and every person may describe himself to himself, then fill out a prescription, dietary and medicinal, of symbol intake. Let this be checked over by a sympathetic colleague or friend who may suggest modifications. Then let the prescription be punched upon a card and filed in the Central professional communications clearinghouse. Then each month, by electronic & mechanical means, send each client his personal supply of materials -- books, papers, news, articles, abstracts, lists, and also (why be unrealistic) paintings, jokes, murder mysteries and whatever else suits his custom. He can vary his prescription from time to time as his wants change.
John Dryfoos phoned to say that my stocks and calls are moving up. I know. He wanted to talk, too. He is a strange and attractive lad. Polite and brusque. Husky of chest and shoulder and badly crippled (from polio, I think) in his legs. He is culturally something of a barbarian but doesn't reveal it because he speaks well, is keenly intelligent, and has an effective, peremptory manner. He is shy and yet cannot help but blurt opinions. His financial (and I suppose personal) judgments are still somewhat hasty. While he is pleased with how complaisant I am with his management of my funds, he also seeks reassurance and decisions from me, sliding from the "let me do it all myself" mood to the "help me on this one" mood and I think liking me because I help him through the barrier between the two poles without tripping him.
General Howley asked me today to devote strong energies to a new prospectus on a recreation center for NYC. I replied that Chancellor Stoddard & I had been going down the list of Center projects to see how they might be disposed of & when we came to this one Stoddard said: "I'm going to appoint a Dean of Education soon and you can hand it over to him." Howley was taken aback. We have to get someone to work on this, he finally said. I was laughing up my sleeve. How easy it is to airily dispose of problems by being decisive. Now Howley will nudge him. And sure enough, the General finally declared, "I'll speak to Stoddard, and ask him to ask you or somebody to work on this project. Of course, you don't have to do it just because I suggest it but you should spend a half year or a year working on the cam." I was even more amused. Wouldn't it be typical of the throes of bureaucracy to end up taking 50 projects away from me & handing me back one of them as my whole job? Then Howley advised me not to take any attempt at reorgn. too seriously, inasmuch as Stoddard was a pigeonholing type, unlike John Ivey, and liked the idea of pyramidal reporting on a narrow span of control. Dr. Ellsworth, his assistant, agreed with him. We joked a bit and parted.
11 PM en route Princeton
Herbert Simon of Carnegie Tech came to the flat for drinks at 5:45 and at 7:30 we walked to La Bilbaina for dinner. We drank and ate heavily & well and talked agreeably for hours. He returned to the Biltmore, where he is staying while delivering a lecture series at the NYU School of commerce on computer simulation of decision-making. I returned to 12 Perry, napped a half an hour, and caught the train. Herb is one of the numerous proud club of the University of Chicago's Golden period of the 20s & 30s. He is tall, dark, handsome, of trim figure. He is intense, almost but not quite nervous and therefore impresses one and keep him back on his heels, but not so much as to set up strong negative defenses. He is extremely well-organized in life and work & has such five years program calculated in advance.
The Nations
A nation not a thing of beauty
Its types are one or many
Median, Aver., mode
Law, customs, art, music
History & traditions
Its conduct by itself
w/ others
Carlo with Jill to see me off at Princeton Jn. He had his tonsils & adenoids removed on Saturday and has been morose and irritable since, often whimpering and complaining. He is better now and eats well again. Jill has done her usual splendid job of nursing him & managing everything at home well.
I spent three days largely on my income tax returns, completing not only my own complicated personal forms that include a capital gains & losses report and a professional business return, but also a METRON corporate return and a partnership return. A hateful task; I must take time to write an essay on the single poll tax. All these complicated taxes are barbarisms, insane rationalistic rituals wasteful of lives, tempers, time, resources, minds, and higher values. We need a simple tax that falls like a great axe twice or thrice a year.
Nothing more written on the train this morning because Mrs. Blumenfeld, who boarded the train with me, engaged me in conversation. She is a smart gal though I find her too assertive and inquisitive. At least she is now offering herself to my projected magazine, the American Social Scientist, and would no doubt be very helpful. Her husband is building a hydrogen atom buster and camera at Forrestal labs.
We have played tennis twice, Cathy and I. I have interested Paul at 10 in practicing tennis too. He learns fast but gets furious -- it's so amusing -- when he doesn't score points against me. I tell him kindly that he must not expect overnight to beat me. John (8) played against a wall for the first time. Cathy looks good, is beginning to give me a race.
Paul has been playing baseball with about fifteen other boys of similar age on the big field by the Country Day School. I watched them unobserved while flying kites. They are without adults & formal leadership & yet play for five hours without fights or breakdowns. They move along at a relaxed, undriven pace through many long innings. Much arguing (Paul argues little), some ragging. I marvel at the complex natural coordination that occurs.
Spent most of yesterday on a PROD editorial criticizing the Ford Foundation.
In Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, a passage describes the marvel of some Incas at a Negro in Pizarro's company, his ebony color, his dazzling teeth, his broad smile & sunny disposition. The Spanish diarist's words, luckily quoted, read the same, so it wasn't Prescott's possible stereotype of the Negro. Again I think, if this may be a common appearance and behavior of a Negro in the early 16th century before the slave system was established, indeed a century before the 1st Eng. settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, then are the people, the historians, the social psychologists and the disgruntled political agitators correct in ascribing the frequent amiability of Negroes to a "slave psychology?" The latter is a plausible theory: a subjected people finds straightforward action and speech impossible, an expression of true emotion dangerous; so it smiles and appears happy, for that is what appeases the masters. This theory is used by "friend" and foe of the Negroes, the former to agitate and arouse them, the latter to ridicule them. Negroes are made to feel that their mirth is a sin. Many devious reactions are possible, most of them unhappy and unhealthy, including the surly Negro who feels he is being a slave if he smiles at a white man. But if we discover from early Portuguese, Spanish and other sources on Africa indications that these characteristics of Negroes were common in the beginning, a new light and perspective shapes Negro psychology and Caucasian attitude towards it.
April 1960
(see Henry duPont or Robt Hershey on Soc. Invent. Seminar)
Speech by Robt Hershey, VP of DuPont on Industrial Growth & Innovation. He praises US farmer for his rationalistic (my term) approach to his business. By 1800 methods, it wd take 63 of our 73 million working force today to grow what we use. He speaks of "the American farmer" as the innovator. Of course not, but this is accepted democratic convention. Innovating farmers are almost always a minority whose example many of the others must follow. (cf. Gross' & other studies of who first adopt new farm practices.) N. B. that Hershey wd personally probably prefer to cite the leading minority, but discretion calls for a majority or even conscious concept. DuPont Co. runs for office as much as an elected official.
Ambitions:
- To make people good
- To teach people patriotism
- To educ. people to be respectful of one.
These are almost impossible ambitions, yet no one is ridiculed for professing them. Why then when much more probable reforms are suggested do people hoot and jeer? For instance, Nelson Rockefeller asked the NY legislators for a law encouraging voluntary bomb shelter construction and the bill was laughed off the floor of the House. On the other hand the debates & proceedings are replete with outlandish promises, pledges, statements of aims, appeals to action. Moral: do not specify, denote or operationalize. Bay for the moon, but say you are asking for the blessings of heaven. The greater the ambition the less explicit you should be in professing and urging it.
Evaluate great and creative men in monetary terms. Everything else is so measured. What results is not truth but is wise admonition. How much is a painting worth. A Degas, say, brings $100,000. It is not a century old. Is Mill's On Liberty not also worth a quarter-of-a-million, The Origin of Species ten millions? Aristotle's Politics a billion or ten billions? Then if a capable writer is subvented by $50,000 or $100,000, is this not perhaps a respectable gamble? So foundations, universities, governments, be warned! This is the way to think of supporting creativity. The man & his work!
Vicky & Jessie have been fanatically gardening -- hunched over like serfs during their Easter vacation, dribbling soil through their hands to pick out rocks and stones. They've planted a hundred different kinds of seed and tell me about them, but the information goes in one ear & out the other. I have a bad memory for people's and flowers' names. Cathy has played tennis every day & is coming along rapidly. Paul was persuaded to give up baseball twice to practice tennis & will soon catch on and be drawn to the game. Jill & Erika painted the rowboat a pretty blue & white, with a big "Suez Q" on the stern. I did numerous menial chores over the long weekend, but played tennis twice on the University courts near the train station. (Every time I think how much money we would save by moving to a town such as Cornwall-on-Hudson, I also think of the several major & minor advantages of life in Princeton, e. g. tennis courts, the libraries, the clever children to match our own, and the fairly good public schools.)
Reading Joyce Cary's engaging story of old age, The Horse's Mouth. Had trouble at the last minute with PROD. Tagliacozzo's "Tree of knowledge" article, based on a huge chart, is too long. The chart would not reduce properly either. So it must wait until Fall. Hutchinson, head of Air Force behavioral research, called to say that he could not clear his proposal for a new Institute of Security Policy in time to print in PROD. He was elated though at the unforeseen (but foreseeable) dividend that the note was passing through the Air Force, Pentagon, and National Security Council, and the very people who wouldn't have otherwise read it but should, are now doing so. I finally placed my article on "Law & Behavior" in the issue. It is a trifle long but relevant and, I think, important. The Journal, Social Research, had previously rejected it, and it was awaiting transmittal to another magazine. Giorgio Braga's note on general communication theory caused great trouble, but I felt it was intrinsically meritorious and did my best to pull it out of its almost impossible crypt.
I almost but not quite made it to mass yesterday, one more in a string of sins to confess when the time comes. Various theological speculations, such as how close an acceptable scientific theory might come to the Christian theory of the resurrection of Christ (several plausible explanations of the events are available, but none has to do with rising from the dead to heaven -- for that we would have to seek links in a universal unconscious realm of symbols and [reasties] where scientific truth doesn't apply & new rules of truth need to be set up; but we lack the concepts & tools of this realm of discourse). Also, of course the interminable problem of useful social fictions: should we not act as if it were true, inasmuch as men must believe firmly in a direct connection between the world of their everyday morality and the movement of eternal heavens. (I myself do not strongly doubt this need in the short run of man but I insist upon the aristocratic privilege of judging the eternal & the long-run future of man by myself.)
* * * * *
I note in the newspaper that the President of the U. of Illinois, Henry, has fired a professor who publicly said he thought pre-marital sexual experiences not a matter for condemnation and probably beneficial. An unjust action, if this is all there is to it. Even with three daughters of beauty & intelligence, and with the experience of the years and much thought, I have been moving towards this professor's ideas myself. A great many marriages would be saved whether from divorce or from indifference, if the partners had previously had some intimate affectional experience and would tolerate this knowledge on the part of each other.
* * * * *
One more problem of Catholic morality. I believe there must be a dozen such where I have taken up a contrary position. I most write about them, if only for my own learning -- the two above, divorce, population control, hell eternal, etc. Why do I say I am Catholic. Because now the whole immediate family is Catholic and the social harmony in the family is considerable. Also I accord the Church & Pope their authority, so far as it may extend personally, from ancient times. Also the extreme wisdom & logic of the church dogma appeals to me in contrast to the utter confusion & hypocrisy of other creeds. Too, it contains a great part of our history & culture; why throw away the keys to this treasure? Also I am stubborn & like to do what others cannot understand among the population's scores. How are different scores related to personality? How are they related to objective situation? To happiness? To satisfaction? To age? To intelligence? What enormous improvements in philosophy, ethics, and social sciences might be made if some of these parameters of life were known! (I must essay the experiment one day. Perhaps I can use an alarm watch set for five minute periods throughout the day, with a counter for pleasure, neutrality, & displeasure. Both of which gadgets should be inconspicuous and silent. Query: Is there a character syndrome that invariably audits experience even after 5 minutes and puts a stamp of feeling upon the period evaluated, independently of the quality of the experience to some extent. For example, my leg is cramped, my pad shaking from the movement of this train, the thoughts not easy ones, yet I should unhesitatingly score the last five minutes as pleasurable. Someone else might say: "No! Unpleasant but satisfying in that something was accomplished. Or at least neutral." Also perhaps we are both right for ourselves -- which gives us a subjective measure in one sense, but a possibly greatly useful objective measure for the larger purposes of our study.)
As we groaned and turned over to start the new day in the bright sunlight, I thought and said to Jill, How strange that one can be generally happy but so irked by small things not to notice it. I referred to herself but also to me. Being awakened prematurely, stubbing a toe, eating too heavy a dinner, missing a train, submitting to a child's anger and spite, finding the tennis courts crowded, nicking a fender of the car, standing in a queue, finding many lights ablaze and doors open needlessly, catching a cinder in the eye, being jostled by a thoughtless or rude person, reading items of unpleasant news. I wish the proportion of unpleasant to pleasant time might be measured. First, of course, operational definitions -- what is "pleasant" & what measurable degrees of it are these? Not many, perhaps, but 3 degrees should be adequately & reliably sensed -- at least, that is, pleasant, neutral, unpleasant. In all this pleasure should be distinguished from "satisfaction", "happiness" and "joy." Transient pain & impatience might indicate anti-pleasure. Anything that one would rather do at the moment than not do, given the short-range alternative possibilities of the moment, wd be pleasure. An absence of notable feeling one way or the other wd be "neutral". What would your score for the day, month, year be? How would the variances occur? What differences exist
[page missing ?]
I scarcely ate during yesterday, arrived home with a hurting eye and slight nausea, so ate very little at dinner, then recovered and felt much better than usual because I had drunk and eaten less than usual. I must do this more often.
At 9:30 yesterday, visited the bank to sign loan for the new car, which will be in METRON's corporate title. Spoke to Sebastian. Wrote in my journal. Drove to Trenton to pick up the new car, whose windshield had been replaced. Drove rapidly to catch the train to NYC at Princeton Jn. Crashed into the parking lot, swung aboard the train just as it was pulling out. Read Time mag. (it has a neutral article on the Illinois professor fired for suggesting pre-marital sex relations may be good for some; also good article on St. Paul's life). Bought three pairs of wash trousers at Macy's.
Then visited Bob Kopple's office at 4:50 7th Ave. He has bounced back from his rejection by Moses, as Exec. V-P of the World's Fair & is organizing a corporation to supply the full range of consulting services to companies, nations and others wishing to exhibit at the Fair. He invited me to join the group and I agreed. The enterprise will be particularly welcome since, besides the chance of good earnings, it will provide a release of energies now and probably for some time to be pent up by Stoddard's opposition to the Research Center concept at NYU.
I taxied to Washington Square afterwards and spoke for a few minutes privately with Dimock before we were joined by Lou Koenig and a newly appointed Assistant Professor of considerable promise, Wessler, who has studied in Germany, England and America, has lived in Hongkong and has had other varied and exotic experiences. He is tall, handsome, sandy-haired and eyed, with a [Lemuiserie] curl of lip that makes him a trifle pretty with a suspicion of petulance.
Then home by train to dinner w/ Renée, Jill's aunt, & Ben Mitler. They have spent the winter in Florida. Renée gave Jill an old round silver pin, mounted with hundreds of tiny pearls and dozens of amethysts. They enjoyed themselves greatly and left at eight.
At nine Jill, Jessie and I saw "Come Back Africa" at the Garden. A stark intelligent set of scenes of Negro life in the S. African police regime, with an unnecessary violent conclusion in murder of the "heroine" by "a villain".
(Circa April 20, 1960) 12 Noon
Carl (7) has just come from school to lunch, trespassing thru the front hall and declaiming
I saw you in the ocean
I saw you in the sea
I see you in the bathtub.
Oops! Pardon me!
We are dissolving MIDCO. I wrote Pat McGuinnis suggesting that the company seemed to be going nowhere and asked whether I shouldn't send him my stock & resignation. He agreed. He has been of no use. He bungled in dishing out cash for MIDCO operations in small sums. He hired Mike on the B & M railroad, where Mike behaved extravagantly and out of my control, & then fired Mike. He has gone back on his original promise to put up $35,000 to carry out a plan. As a result, the operation faltered. The several thousands he did feed in little by little were consumed on small things. He is likable and intelligent in some ways, but not too reliable, highly sensitive to status questions, ambivalent towards learning, and spouts meaningless management principles.
[pages missing]
(circa Apr. 21, 1960)1 AM Perry St.
Tonight the Graduate Pol. Sc. Club met in a social hour. I composed a jewel of remarks listening to Dimock & Saunt talk of their next year's work in absentia, but then rose only in greeting when introduced, swallowing the thoughts so as to shorten the formal proceedings. At ten thirty I left with several of the students, ate and then since it was late, escorted Mrs. Neuman home.
Returning on the subway, I espied an altercation thru the open doors of two cars. The conductor was wrestling with someone. Another figure seemed to be pursuing someone. People sense trouble like deer. The sleepy passengers were in the aisle now craning to see back. The conductor closed our car door and signaled the motorman to halt. He blew the train's whistle. The train paused at a local station for a moment & then rushed along to 59th Street where several loud blasts finally brought a burly colored policeman. He spoke briefly with the conductor and then pulled out of the car a weird looking homosexual who had become unruly in a mixed party of several persons. The policeman slapped him very hard across the face, said "Vamos" and whacked him several times across the back. The passengers reoccupied the train and we went on. The disgusting and demented humanity of Manhattan must number may thousands. And then there would be a half-million utter cynics and amoralists. And another million who are indifferent. And yet another who are racked by hate. What vast human wastes! Then more millions of the self-protective, the cautious, the escapists. And the final anxious multitude of those who would have a better city and would do their difficult, modest bit for it. Hardly the prospect for the heavenly city.
Under the circumstances of the incident could the policeman have done more? He was calm & deliberate; no fury of disgust gripped him. Should he have sent the long-haired man-woman into the midnight streets, prowling, miserable, sick from drugs? Could anything but a moment's respite to trouble occur? And the blows. Gratifying to all who were capable of moral indignation, but perhaps satisfying to the pervert too! If not, then perhaps an incentive to more misconduct. Moreover, why were the other three members of the party permitted to continue? Because they appeared more normal, less bizarre, and were momentarily the victims? The policeman might have been a psychiatrist, a judge, a one-man squad to go three ways. He had to stay on duty at the ramified underground, furthermore. All impossible. He did well. He did the least and best. Someday, we should have hundreds more police and a way of consigning the arrested to remedial authorities. Perhaps an identification card system that would not bring immediate arrest but only a referral is in order.
The interviewers' prose reports of the old that I am reading are so much more stimulating & understandable than the tables based upon them that I think again of the relative merits of a statistical and a Proustian study of reality. Let us say: There must be enough cases to sense all the clues & facts; they must be to the point to prevent great waste of time; they should be standardized to help one think from one case to another; however for policy determinations, various forms of quantification are absolutely necessary, because policy must be generalized prescriptions for visualized future aggregates of people and things. Therefore means, modes, medians, percentiles become the great need of the social theorist and man of affairs.
Not sent because I was happy to discover a new way of reworking the last section, not mentioned by the critics though they may sense a need there, and I phoned Bent. He was pleased to hear from me and said that the Dec. & Mar. issues would contain the article.
all. I have done the same with the new list, but this time include a reason for acting or not acting in each case.
Dear Mr. Bent,
Thanks for your letter. I am sorry if my article is causing the editors trouble. If good new contributions to fields of knowledge came in neat packages, resembling other printable things in every respect except that they are boldly labeled "a novel synthesis!", "a breakthrough!". wouldn't we editors have it easy! I do not know whether fifty years from now my study will be regarded highly. But in any event I feel that some of the queries are Academic and, try as one will, you cannot make an Academic piece out of this one. Forgive me if I jest at your expense but I note that when Academicians get cold feet, they make typical responses. First, they plead their audience's point of view (paragraph 2 of your letter). Then they ask for formal credentials with heightened insistence (para. 3). Then they say that they had always had reservations and these were never fully taken account of (para. 4).
I still have on hand your original list of suggestions and, as I indicated to you in a letter or as you could see from the way it is marked, I took into account every one of them. Naturally, I could not agree with all. I have done the same with the new list, but this time include a reason for acting or not acting in each case.
I agree on a title change and suggest "The Science and Values of Administration."
I do not believe that I need make my work show how it is, or is not, related to other work. Where it is and I know it is, I bring in the other work. Otherwise it stands on what it says. If it is weak, then it must suffer. But it is not an academic exegesis, not because I cannot work that corner, for it is as easy as a sidewalk sketch would be for Matisse; the study is something quite different; it is an attempt to form a broad new set of meanings.
I believe that the manuscript is now ready to go, for better or worse. If your board thinks so too, you might now be able to make the deadline. If you feel that the Quarterly will be better without it, please return the study. There is little use in reviewing who is committed to whom for what.
Sincerely yours,
* * * * *
A pause while reading two hundred case studies of the lives of old people in Milwaukee. Yesterday morning Jill balked with finality at going on w/ the task of rewriting Msgr. O'Grady's materials that she was given in December, and asked me to take them over and do something with them. I am trapped, no desire to do the job, yet the alternative is to return them and disappoint O'Grady. What can I do? I have so many unfinished plans and work. Of what great value can this hasty intercession be? It has taken me many years to see the point of view of the selfish intellectual, and I still cannot imitate him. Yet he has the means of protecting his work and way of life. Good luck to him! I shall at least continue to support his hateful eccentricities & egomania. Now, two weeks cut out of the heart of Spring! and weeks of accumulated extra load to follow. All I need say to Jill is: "If you can't do it, send it back." But I won't. There is the ruin of my mind. It has an open door & anything at all brash may walk in. The materials on the old are not bad. But they are not great -- because the original theoretical design & questionnaire lack breadth and saliency. And what I might make of it now is less because I did not participate in the field work. Finally, I can only strain tho I may spend eight days on it, if that, whereas something nice might be done in four months. There is a limit to the facility of the most facile.
Yesterday we lifted the newly painted Susy-Q to the top of the car and carried it down to the lake where we launched it and four small boys immediately rowed it out like ducklings taking to the water, there standing out in reds and whites against a quiet murky summer air and stirred grey waters.
I fixed a new drink, Vodka, ice, vermouth, and a tiny pepperoncino -- a Russkipippini. I drank it while Anna Maria, who doesn't drink, exploded into waves of diatribe against God & life, exclaiming dramatically & with a brilliant natural cogency against the dirty tricks played on man and all of nature by God, if he exists. "He gave us free will & we fell from paradise," I said. "But God knows everything" she retorted. He knew we would fall. He didn't even have to create us. Why did he: to make us suffer?"
xxxxx
[something missing]
evaluated question in our ideology) when really they don't know where they are going anyhow & wouldn't have the slightest preference on the subject apart from soothing phrases such as "be educated" "fine liberal arts," "broadness of mind," "spirit of free inquiry" and other laughable vacuities.
.
April 20, 1960
Formal Law is for lawbreakers. The more detailed a law or legal system the more unlawfulness or potential illegality is present in the social system. The illegal behavior may often be hostile but also may be indifferent deviance. The latter is found more often in complex large societies of decadent morale and in the law of functional groups rapidly growing or otherwise changing, the segments of the general division of labor. The hostile anti-law is revealed in the insistence upon clarity & specificity. The "authoritarian type," who is misnamed -- it should be the "hostile" type, -- continually foists the burden of clarity and definition upon the lawmakers. Negativism, resistance to change, rigidity, defensive aggressiveness, anti-authoritarianism are the traits of this anti-law syndrome, which paradoxically, as with authoritarianism, take the form of an insistence upon lawfulness, legality, determination of the law, demand for detailed construction of the law, etc. You may notice the same among children, among troops, work groups & classrooms, when the students of others resist a proposition, becoming ever more technical in their demands of the instructor, wanting to know where we are going (a positively [something missing]
I had no chance to offer any profound theological observations, of course. She came at me, eyes flashing, eloquent as her grandfather Bus & I laughed at how impossible it was to stay her. What I might have offered was the exceedingly abstract theory of the perfect rationality & therefore determinism of God, who had to do all that he did because that was his nature. Or I might have put forward the heretical view, that I had devised some time ago, of God as the not quite perfect Being who did what he could but had internal limitations. Not a chance. She was exploding firecrackers right & left. Then she subsided, triumphant, took her new beautiful baby back from Jill and proceeded to fondle and feed him, who had been the crying cause of it all in the first place.
(April 25, 1960 cont')
Wed. April 27, 1960 NYC 8:00 AM
Breakfasting on tea and a leftover cherry cheese blintze from Ratner's last night. It is cold but tasty, and sinks into the stomach like a rock.
But told me that Anna Maria is fleeing from Princeton to Florence in two weeks. Very silly of her, dragging along the two children and interrupting some constructive painting & teaching. But she is a madcap & this is her way of exploding.
Seminar on social invention met last evening, as usual. Two students spoke, Skaskiev, an intense, Ukrainian, and Balderas, a pretty Filipino. Shackews's only promise at this point lies in his acquisition of the humanist's rhetoric of attack on social science. Balderas was struggling along. Of the class of twelve, no more than three can make any progress on a truly graduate level, tho all are graduate students. Some of the rest are getting glimmerings of ideas. So it goes. I suppose I should hold high the banner of my profession & express delight in the evidences of progress. Not at all I work hard to raise people's level of thought & am pleased with signs of comprehension, but the whole business disgusts and bores me. And to think of the plague of MA and PhD theses & examinations that will beset me next year when my teaching program increases! What makes so many people like to teach? Unfitness for any else. ( I doubt this except in the sense that they cannot change careers readily.) Ignorance of other professions and occupations. Freedom (the long holidays and vacations & the lack of fixed hours -- very appealing to me, even tho I rarely use them for recreation or solitary scholarship). High status - important to a great many. An illusion of remaining young that comes from hanging out with the young. Evangelism, to win converts to scientific and humanistic religions, in a few cases. To help and permit minds to grow and flourish -- everyone touches in life can be helped in this way; teaching is only one, formalized method. I'm not even sure that it presents the most considerable occasion for practicing the virtue, because of excessive formality, fragmentary contact, and lack of human material appropriate to the special goals of the teacher. In the last case, which I suppose upsets me in relation to my class, it may well be assumed that no more than a couple of hundred out of thousands of graduate students in pol. sci. should be pursuing this course of studies. At only a dozen universities can one reach more than an isolated student of promise. [on top margin: April 27, 1960]. Most professors when forced on this point will say resignedly, "but we need so many teachers" which is tantamount to saying we need to produce many more of these same students who are admittedly of little consequence professionally. I say give them a few principles of social science in high school & college and train them for an occupation such as government administration in their last year or at certificating institute at most. And when they wish to learn more about anything in the wide world, let them do it in their off-time through life. I see my fault. I want to excite and create genius in students. But nearly everybody in the world wants simply to address others or to be trained. Perhaps the only way out of this opposition of ideals is to become somewhat of a cheat -- play the game with every body and the system, but spend as much time as possible on the bench, in the locker room & behind the stands. Then, of course, one cannot be a "good teacher," in the conventional sense. He is "good" to a dozen or two men & women only, more if he writes on popular subjects, and to history, the great enemy of popular culture.
Last night I took Stephanie to see a newly arrived English film, "It's all right, Jack", and found its satire of English unions and management uproariously funny. The comic brush swept over everything in England today. A list of targets would take pages. At times the underlying indignation almost flowed over but the flame was deftly turned off just at the right moment. Really, if a person can thoroughly understand and appreciate every incident, item, gesture, and glance in that movie, I should give him a PhD in any of the humane studies without examination.
A revision of present system of voting is in order. We should consider carefully the advantages of systems whereby men collect votes over a period of time & turn them in whenever the time is appropriate. The electorate would be much more involved, agitated, interested, and instructed by some such method. I was struck by this idea in 1947 when writing my dissertation. An American had suggested some such system in the early nineteenth century, and I mentioned it in my Public and Republic.
(Jessie found this Papermate pen in the fish pond at the University and I offered her $2 for it. She was delighted to accept. I'm not so sure of the "bargain" for me.)
Read Filer's Puts & Calls last night from cover to cover & now feel somewhat informed on the definitions of terms in this exotic mode of gambling. The stock market yesterday sunk to a 17-month low. I called John Dryfoos a few minutes ago. "John,"I said, "shouldn't we buy two or three "puts" on stocks most [words missing; also note on top says: (April 28, 1960 cont.d)] call, but one loses only the cost of either, which one does mostly anyhow in a straddle. And if there is any considerable relative probability in one stock going down & another going up, then the put on the former & a call on the latter would cancel out the market movement, and permit realization of profit from both possibilities. We would be adding two positive probabilities of, say, .3 getting +3 + 3/2 = .3 on both and making the market a constant. With a straddle, we would be canceling out the probabilities (+3 -3 = 0) so far as the cost of the option is concerned, and making the market a constant. Holding only a call means +.3/1 = .3 but with the market no longer a constant. John was adamant & there was no use forcing him to hear this theory. Especially since I am a novice and he is adept at the business. Let me choose, without good knowledge, 3 possibly declining stocks, however, from offers in the NYTimes this A. M. and do a [decy] run on "puts" for them - 6 mos. 10 days (say Nov. 1) from today April 29: Studebaker 200.00 at 11 3/4; Amper 32 3/4 at $550; Std. Oil of N.J. (Oct. 24) $487.50 at 44. These are not idea, but let us see what happens to them, and whether my theory would work.
April 1960 [messy typewritten pages]: deleted portions of a mss.
Some organizations incorporate their clientele as part of the organization. In these cases, substantive goals are internal. When clientele are quite outside the organization, the substantive goals are external to the organization. All organizations can be placed on a continuum of the degree to which they are reference groups to their clientele. This invites confusion in analyzing administration, but I see no way out of the problem. Then there are instrumental goals or the objectives of an organization sought as a way to the substantive goals. Finally, there are the categories of executives, participants and clientele.
The interactions of all these variables may be reduced to symbolic form under stipulated conditions. I beg the reader's indulgence for initiating the process, but it is helpful in imagining the shape of the vast scientific journeys ahead of man.
Substantive goal = SG
Instrumental goal = IG
Executives = E
Participants = P
Clientele = C
(The organization) = EPC
Then EPC acts by IG to achieve SG, or SG = f(EPC IG) where = "acting upon".
Probably the most important values involved in administration are power (control), income (I), and respect (R). Each may be both substantive or instrumental.
Let SG = (P)(I)(R) (Power, income, and respect)
Let IG = pri
Now PIR = f (EPC pir)
For purposes of analyzing an administration of operation, this formula must be devolved into its individual parts. Thus, if one wishes to know the extent of power as a substantive goal in any administrative establishment, he solves the problem:
P =
Or, if one wishes to determine the extent to which the executives of an organization determine its substantive goals, then:
Ep to gain EP (Executives organize their own power to
gain substantive power)
P to gain EP (Participants abet executives' power to
gain substantive power for executives)
C Ep to gain EP (Clients abet executives' power to gain
substantive power for executives)
I do not intend, however, to use the many special cases of the formula to organize my materials and would not advise it - at any rate not in the present state of behavioral science.. The general formula is presented principally for theoretical clarification - to define the scope of administrative science, to exhibit the key variables, to show the several important dimensions in analyzing administrative operations, and to point out how many significant variants of organization are at least theoretically possible.
The Fallacy of Administration as a Neutral Activity
From the conflicts of the several goals within and without the organization, from the overlapping of the reference groups of the participants in an organization, come several general and common conflicts of high importance to the study of administration. They are conflicts of a moral, structural, and political character.
Moreover, the confusion besetting administrators who are confronted with these essential conflicts is slight when compared with the bafflement of writers upon administration. Most have failed utterly to appreciate the essential nature of administration as a moral activity and have tried to develop a science of administration based upon some kind of neutral or objective theory. There is no such neutrality or objectivity in administration. There is only a certain structuring or patterning of administrative actions according to some combination of values. Beginning to write about a science of administration with a neutralistic theory is the worst possible beginning. It not only lends a fundamental falsity of approach but fosters a succession of futile debates and pseudo-problems. A notorious example is the quarrel over whether politics and administration are separate. Other illustrations could be drawn from the lengthy disputes over "administration as law"against "administration as behavior," over "formal" as against "informal" administrative behavior, of staff versus line, and of centralization versus decentralization. The questions and many more might be stabilized on theoretical grounds if they were approached with a clear perception of the moral axiomatics of administration, as I have outlined them above.
Summary
To summarize the foregoing remarks, organizations are congeries of administrative actions patterned according to sponsored goals. These goals may be substantive or instrumental. The substantive goals include a bestowing of benefits or hardships upon a clientele, an influencing of other organizations that may be thought of as special kinds of clientele, and the producing of a preferred condition of the organization itself. Among the instrumental goals of an organization are all actions taken as means of facilitating a substantive goal by inflicting benefits or hardships upon a clientele or influencing other organizations, and all actions taken to facilitate the same ends and also the producing of a preferred condition of the organization itself by means of manipulating the conditions of administrative action in the organization. This last form of conduct would include certain kinds of action commonly classified under the arrangement of offices, moral operations, resource allocations, staff services, and recruitment.
Ate a light supper last night of white Spanish dry wine, cream mushroom soup, Italian bread, endive & tuna salad, coffee, and worked from 8:30 until 2 AM, editing the mss. of "General theory of administration". I continue to be pleased with it. It is perhaps 1/5 altered since its first draft six years ago. This morning I phoned Fred Bent at Cornell. He was pleased to hear it would be ready soon and promised publication in the December and March issues of the Administrative Behavior Quarterly.
I was out at 8 this morning. Worked another hour on the mss at the office. Talked with Ruth Powell about her namesake's political activities. WE agreed that Congressman Powell, Hulan Jack and other Negro (and white) leaders follow a pattern of democratic politics that is easy for the bourgeoisie to condemn but hard to replace by a pattern of genteel leadership. Much has to [be] permitted under the circumstances that Negro politicians face that [which] would not be tolerated where racial discrimination is not practiced.
