Design Feb. ABS
Poetry
Finish Elements Chapter 16
Correspondence
Prepare Social Invention Syllabus
Prepare Methodology Syllabus
Prepare Political Process course syllabus
Do income tax
Painting
Film Distribution: Contemporary Films; Call Solon; Call Celia Anderson
Sell ABS
Basement remodeling
Christmas gifts
Papers to do:
1. Between legend, rumor, and reporting
2. Political activity theory
3. Election theory
4. Natural law and positive law
5. On the history of social science
6. Remembrances of an Incident
Commercial Advertising is shocking. Every intelligent impulse is to stifle it somehow. I do note the gloomy pleas for cancer associations, heart disease prevention societies, and dull activities on the "non-profit" radio stations. I would prefer the mostly cheerful paid ads.
How often it is man's lot to keep what he dislikes for fear of worse.
The intelligent man must learn to live with machine civilization and its companion advertising. These are collectivism, mass rule (through its manipulators, managers and ad men) over private and free minds. But once upon a time men were collectivized by fear of nature and they could much less readily choose what they would hear from their family and villagers. Do not, even now, people often turn on the radio and television to shut out the insufferable stupidity or discord of the near ones?
The law of leverage:
| /
| /
The | /
"nut" | /
|____________
Time 1 Time 2
in business - stock block - influence elsewhere
in politics - small bloc of votes - influence elsewhere
i. e. a relatively small compact base or "nut" position can be and is pyramided extensively
cf. Rockefeller's oil companies, etc.
cf. ward leader, etc.
cf. small money man, big money man, and manipulator
If humanities should really be classified generally as social science, and the differences between social and natural science are not sufficient to create qualitative absolute barrier, then given ONE SCIENCE, how should it be divided.
There are no new laws to be discovered in social science. So those who hoped to win fame as Newtons or Einsteins had better give up. The reason is that man has always known man well. He has only lacked desire and means of precisely stating his knowledge. What can come then in the way of laws are only formulations. These are "worked", not "discovered". The natural sciences today tend this way but social science has been thus, with deviations, since Aristotle. Perhaps there will for long be excitement in physical discoveries, for the mind does not quickly appreciate that a reformulation alone is involved, but in behavioral discoveries we sense immediately the commonness of the discovery.
We know in two great civilizations the ultimate rise of the intellectual myth-bearers to supremacy in the status system, though connected with and perhaps subordinated to the kingly group, viz., the Hindu Brahmanism and the Chinese literati. Why has not the West produced an analogy? The priesthood of the middle ages? Not close enough perhaps. Must there be a complex society and a developing bureaucracy? Then will not present conditions produce such? Is the present aggressive role of science the beginnings of the new Brahmanism? Certainly, it is a bureaucratized intelligentsia that is developing.
The possibility of a legal language that is -- there is no reason, especially given the jargon of lawyers and courts, why a special efficient language cannot be invented for all legislation and court proceedings. The possibilities of this are manifested to me as I am translating the Italian law of atomic power and see how, though there is much repetitiveness, there are also unexplained and probably unjustified variations in wording, corresponding perhaps to humanistic or literary impulses and/or to slovenliness coming from nonrationalistic approaches (or not-sufficiently rationalistic approach) to the key raison d'être of legal language.
This new language can be all tied in with the quantitative studies of judicial opinion now occurring.
January 1962
A New Kind of Novel
Long-lasting
Universal language
Universal meaning
Universal importance.
Christmas list 1961
Jill - Pajamas
Mom - candy and flowers
Mary - scarf
Printers - cookies
Bus - sox
Dad - winter undershirts and shirt
Judy comb, brush
Mailman, cookies
Cath - gold coin
Vic - sox
Lorraine - comb brush
Garbage man - cookies
Gus (Candide)
Ed Comb and brush
Stephanie - pin
Milkman - box handkerchiefs and wine
Vic (Comb, brush set)
Paul (belt, handkerchief, ties)
Erika - Record
John (belt, handkerchief, ties)
Julia - scarf
Carl (cards and chips)
Ted - gloves
Chris - Italian folk book
Janitor - sherry
January 1962 ?
Morals (as formulated in principles and in discussion [symbol exchanges]) are the sensing devices between the certainty of animals and the certainty of perfect rationality (or goodness).
January 1962 ?
Some come to history because they love the past, others because of some operational need. I am one of the latter type. I began my historical study to find the answer to a contemporary problem concerning representation (Public and Republic, 1949). I began a new historical work when I found some important operational problems of social science unanswered without a resort to history.
