We are about to see the translation of the code which, operating within the cells, sets the conditions of individual and organic differences. We have gone very far down into the beginning of life and begin to see clearly the chemistry at work, arranging itself and imprinting its successors. yet no answer is in sight to the question why does matter move this way? Why does it go to all of this trouble to replicate itself precisely and profusely. That is, when this present great phase of discovery is ended, will we have made any more profound discovery than that the sperm and egg together create a new being, or before that, that babies come from pregnant ladies? We need no more plumbing, no matter how exotic and delicate, to tell us that life is profoundly mysterious. the first man who reflected upon it knew it. Being and change -- the great riddle posed by the Greeks yearning for certainty -- are still the mystery. Breakdown at infinitum the atoms of the cell. Reprint people, as we now can breed them, and as our ancestors bore them: still we only reflect ourselves. The ultimate question remains always, why does matter exist and move.
A hard weekend -- Friday the March issue bibliography; Saturday the same and a prospectus to be presented to a Washington businessman for the sale of METRON (ABS); Sunday going over 300 pages of final mss. for the World Politics book; Monday a long business with Lobel, a Philadelphia printer, over lunch (again the ABS), and then more ABS and preparation for my Tuesday lectures.
They did go off well. So did Yaw Mann's defense of his thesis in the afternoon, and lunch with Dimock, and dinner with Stephanie after my lecture and a coffee with Ed at the Bitter End where a clever mime gives forth.
Breakfast at 8:00 at Newark Airport with Sid Roth, Director of Research Sciences, NYU, and the gentle old publisher, Charles Boni, who is interested in IR (information retrieval). Then, with Melmed, Engineer of the Computation Center, a short flight to frigid Griffis Air Force Base where we examined some new equipment for mechanical abstracting and translation and discussed sundry research ideas in the area of air force intelligence analysis. Back at 6:30 just in time for dinner with Ken Thompson, Ray Handy, Joe Tannenhaus, Tom Hovet, Tom Adam and Bob Woetzel. Ken then spoke at length and from a script about U.S. diplomacy in 1796 and 1962. he had many interesting facts but rushed through them, head down and merely reading, and besides, little exciting theory emerged. I said hello to a few people and came home.
Why does any one keep a journal. It would take a book to say anything about a day. Or as Louis XVI would say in his journal so often, "rien".
An ideal form of book binding would be a cover with a magnetized spine and then magnetized paper edges. Doing away thus with fast permanent binding and clumsy rings.
To Stephanie on finishing her editing of the International Relations manuscript, with a gift of Brecht's poems:
Is this a Valentine,
or specious bribe?
A bouquet? A Yearning Sign?
Or deductible cost to ascribe
to completing very well
a confused world review
six hundred pages of dither.
I cannot tell.
Nor can you either.
But wise Internal Revenue
Will process it pell-mell.
For about eight months I have had a recurring idea of a ten-year marriage cycle. It comes to me now on the stimulus of real cases. The case occurs, the theory occurs, the two fit fairly well, and I think, "Well, the idea isn't bad!"
Of couples married for ten years, with, of course, an option to renew "until death do them part", a variety of conditions would be affected:
a. The character of the emotional tie between the partners to marriage.
b. The attitudes and lives of the partners prior to marriage.
c. The bearing and raising of children
d. The legal obligations of the partners before during and after marriage.
e. The rate of divorce and remarriage
f. The relation of the outside world to the home
g. The career possibilities of men and women
h. The psychological and social character of the age groupings -- 10-20. 21-32, 33-45, 46-57, 58-69, 70-80, 80-
Several of these latter conditions reflect the primary circumstances of "a" through "d", but lend a hand in the full shaping of the somewhat changed social order that would follow.
Here are some of my guesses concerning them:
a. There would be a consistently higher level of love between the marriage partners. This would hold true whether or not they divorced after the first, second, or another period of ten years. Stability within the decades would be enhanced.
b. The marriage bond would be assumed no less lightly than at present because most young persons cannot and will not think of what married life would be like beyond the first several years anyhow. The second or third choices, if they occur, will be wiser and more enduring.
c. In general, the children will expect less of their parents and perhaps receive more. Since a great many marriages now end in divorce, a great part of the situation could not be worsened. More important and positive, the shame felt by children of divorced parents will be eliminated. The problem of custody and care of children in divorce will remain what it is today, apart from the aforesaid, and improvements in this condition would, it is hoped, continue. if most children are borne in an early year of marriage, then except for the first possible occasion of divorce, they will be independent enough to endure any separation without difficulty.
d. Fortunes are easier to arrange by decade than by lifetimes. Legal and financial problems of marriage are therefore likely to be lessened. Women are not slaves today as in days of old. They can take care of themselves.
e. The average deviation of marriages will diminish, but not greatly. The number of divorces will go up, and of marriages also. More people will be in a married state.
f. Escapes into the outside world for purely personal reasons will diminish. There will be a lessening of interference and snooping by the outside world into personal relations. Often now, the press and acquaintances take advantage of the myth of the irrevocable marriage in order to stab through the cloak for unfortunate but common violations of the myth.
g. Men and women may develop their careers more freely.
h. See below. Statistical studies must be used to answer pertinent questions here as before. perhaps the interval chosen should be 8 or 12.
Anyhow, people's lives are not single pieces as of old when from age 14-45 (average age of death?) one setting, one job, a unity was the rule. Today there are at least three and probably five significantly different periods in the educative prolonged to 21, the post-educative or early career to 32, the middle finding of place and fulfillment, the enjoyment is gains or turning away to 60, the aging.
In general, whatever advantages and disadvantages may be attendant upon divorce will tend to persist, but the new system would overlay that pattern with a number of modifying and independent advantages.
There would be an enrichment of marriage in all periods of life. The eagerness of the newly weds would not longer carry the pathos that the older, wiser married people see in it.
People change considerably through life and it is a great strain on themselves an their partners if the latter have to change with them. Often each goes in an opposite direction. Why then enforce this bond? To show how far humans may be stretched on a rack without breaking?
The decades of life flow differently. The torrent of youth, the confidence and grind of the twenties, the strains and reevaluations of the thirties, the sustained stolid forties, the fifties with other interests, the sixties with the abstractions and introspection of aging, the seventies in calm and methodicalness, and the contemplation and loftiness of old age, these are not, nor should not be, expected to match 2 people alike forever. Lucky and bravo for those who cover the whole span together happily. Lucky also those who make a more complicated voyage happily!
Psychotherapy is not morally superior to chemistry or surgery in the treatment of, say, paranoid schizophrenia. It is, like these other means, a reordering of neural patterns. It is reconditioning, quite like the Pavlovian school of conditioned responses in psychology. But its impact in reassociating and restructuring the paths of response in the patient is done by a lengthy, patient, introspective, bourgeois method. All methods presume to determine character. That is, they say what should be or should not be contained in attitude, action, and response. When certain old associations and neural response overlays are excised by surgery or chemistry (including good old booze), new paths and overlays are expected to develop and do, with varying degrees of "success", defined as coincidence with diagnosis and manipulative intent. That form of therapy is best which most accurately and economically achieves the ends sought. We line up the criteria of desiderata, capabilities, and risk (meaning threats of disadvantage, itself of course, a moral quality) and, weighing them all, strike a balance for a given therapy or combination of therapeutic methods. Will psychotherapy by analysis be more subtle and precise in reducing the painful associations producing psychosis without reducing the useful and happy ones. (After all, man is his memories, to a great extent, and we kill him as we cut them out or block them off.) So if we crack the exalted, authoritative, austere, repressive and hated unconscious image of the father, without destroying the richness of childhood and even infantile experience, we emerge with a "cured"patient who is "more cured" than if the "cure" were accomplished at the expense of physical damage or psychic illumination of the host of useful and even enjoyable references surrounding the element that is destroying the personality.
I am rewriting the new first chapter of the Elements. I have chosen 30 basic ideas of political science as the framework of the chapter, instead of the 25 or so greatest philosophers. it makes for smoother and more systematic and clear exposition. But I think as I look at the ideas,
"Maybe there are even fewer." for instance, should not nationalism (16th century plus) be treated as a derivative of the idea of the political community? Isn't authority the parent of sovereignty? And international law out of the idea of the world fraternity.
Also, how can the ideas be grouped?
Major emphasis
Idea 1. Directive 2. Analytic 3. Method
authority political community world as math. order
dems. to social compet. div. of labor & hierarchy man as measure
constitutionalism world-history empirical method
pol. hedonism power politics introspective method
world fraternity international law value-free pol. sci.
existential pol. activism econ. determinism [rattistic] analysis of
systematic pol.-ethical soc. of class elite law
reprieve govt. communications applied social science
sovereignty models of society
nationalism operational inquiry
liberal state unconscious factors in
pol. behavior
No. The 3 divisions do not cut the universe cleanly. 2. especially falls apart into 1. and 3. Actually this operation does show how all 30 have an evaluational, substantive side and a method. side.
A decisive intellectual is a contradiction in terms.
Up early, perhaps because of a tiny pin-prick of pain in the first segment of the fourth finger of my left hand. Crazy body. I worked on the 1st Chapter of the Elements.
We have a man back from 3 turns of the world in space. A vast and expensive undertaking. A good sober achievement, with a lot of hateful ballyhoo. I think of how much greater a personal achievement was Lindbergh's flight of the Atlantic, with all the solitary anxious preparations in advance and the lonely radio-less flight. The younger generation cannot draw the measure, of course, so they must be happy with what is offered. We told them at breakfast yesterday that the greatest demands on courage were made in respect to authorities and groups. To put something onto paper, too, knowing how the world and one's colleagues stand abut armed to the teeth, is tougher than riding a spaceship at this point.
Happy birthday, George Washington! A disciplined intelligent man you were!
The significance of analogies has been never to my knowledge fully assessed. What is made clear is that proof by analogy is not scientific proof. Take, for instance: the head is to the body, as the government to the nation. Are we to say that if you cut off the head the body dies and not so the nation if the government is destroyed? No says logic, the analogy is imperfect and furthermore no empirical or logical truth can be carried by analogy.. As to the first negative, no analogy can be perfect, either with reference to two obviously dissimilar objects or with regard to two seemingly identical objects (for every object is unique except in those ways in which it is in the first place selected -- that in regards to its analogized elements; the whole foundation of classification being after all analogies between objects.
That neither of two animal bodies will live without a head is, at bottom, an empirical, probabilistic statement, not a necessary conclusion as traditional logic would have it.
But, furthermore, we are dealing, in analogy, with a peculiar psychology that is not part of logical proof. What appeals to the mind in the chief analogy here is the jogging of configurational and contextual thought. Or call it also dynamic analysis. That is, associations that would be impossible or difficult to make in terms of the single class of objects alone become immediately clear with the analogy. A whole set of thoughts, propositions, evidence, hypotheses, and interrelations of one area are put to the service of another. Without analogy, the mind, be it scientific or literary, would be starved.
This is as cryptic as the tomb of Tut's father. Operationally I mean, one should reproduce Robinson's book, a beautiful and classic expression of the soc. sci. humanist and educator and liberal ideology of 19th-20th centuries in one column, and then go down in a parallel col. criticizing every it and sentence. In the end, finally, we would have a complete critique of a complete ideologist.
February 25, 1962 - 11 PM -- en route to Washington DC
A crowded day in Princeton, beginning with a typical hurried scanning of the monstrous NY Times Sunday edition over breakfast at 9:30. Two hours of work on the March issue of the ABS, already several days late. Then an hour and a half with Anna Maria. Afterwards several more hours on the ABS. A cake for Jessie's birthday. This was the ninth sitting for a portrait. Two more should finish the work. it shapes up well. I did a little silent time-and-motion study of her at work. The total sitting time averages an hour. She has a regular cycle. She approaches the canvas from eight feet, dabs an average of five marks on it, retreats, looks at her subject, dabs her brush in two or three colors on a large palette, sometimes exchanging one brush for another of the half dozen she carries in the hand, darts another glance at me and approaches the canvas. The cycle varies from a minimum of seventeen seconds and a maximum of forty-five. The average is about twenty-two. thus, in each sitting of an hour, she covers about 2800 feet, over half a mile, and adds 900 brush strokes to the canvas. If she finishes the job in eleven sittings, plus some extra work while I am not present, she will have darted a good six miles and placed over 10,000 daubs upon the canvas. To the sitting time must be added an equal time composed of purchasing and readying the canvas, whitening and stretching it, studying it on occasion between sittings, preparing her materials and cleaning them, and discussing and worrying over the work. If all of this were fitted efficiently into a week, the week would be fairly filled. At best, and given a freely and evenly flowing inspiration, a half dozen portraits or other canvases a month would be a fine production. In fact, given all the factors that upset an ideal schedule in her case, and in most others, I doubt that Anna Maria completes more than fifteen oils a year. Karin Nalbandian seems to do about two dozen, despite being completely free of other demands on her time.
It is an attractive room at the Dupont Plaza Hotel, only a minute's walk from the new ugly Brookings Institution Building where we begin a conference on international information retrieval in the behavioral sciences at 9:30.
The room is red, tan, orange, and white with paintings by Utrillo.
Washington is planning a great parade today for Astronaut Glenn. the weather is uncooperative; it is raining, dark, and chilly.
Coming into the hotel this morning at 1 A.M. I encountered Nevitt Sanford, now at Stanford University. I hadn't seen him in many years. S. J. Brown introduced us in 1945 and I saw him again in 1949. The rest is hearsay, but such is the network of communications and common experience that ties together academicians that we were in a cordial exchange, right away. The universality of the scholar's set is one of the largest value of life. One can go anywhere not only Washington DC, and find a community of life-ways, ideas, and acquaintanceship. What would be the other major values. A place where one can do intellectual work, of course. More freedom of time than most people have is a third. That is the sum.
(February 1962 ?)
On America's need for a transference neurosis.
- incl. historiography - scientific dietetic, and therapeutic
- therapeutic history and crisis
- the vague and incoherent stretching out for a historical transference neurosis in times of collective psychic dysfunction
- the deliberate creation of the conditions of transference neurosis through historical reevaluations (cf. French Rev., Russian Rev., Renaissance classicism, early Christians reevaluation of the fathers.)
Note that T-N in psychoanalysis is provoked with an end in mind. The same is true of the provocation of collective trans-N.
Cf. A. A. Miller, pp. 355 ff. of Contemporary Psychotherapies.
(The Rangell quote is apt here.) This is more than analogy. The 2 are || because they are related, not because they are defined as ||.
February 1962
A work on epistemology might be organized around the origin of conceptions and "objective" fundamental "descriptions of reality".
-- In the so-called harmony of numbers.
-- In vision
-- In rules
-- In definitions
-- In hearing
-- In preferences
- aesthetic
- moral and political
-- In music
-- In invention
-- In constructions (physical)
-- Etc.
Everything is the extension of inner man, verified by the commonality of mankind.
February 1962
Add to "insufficiency" section of article on social science.
The argument on insuff. has two main aspects to it:
Insuff. because not grand enough ends.
Insuff. because not adequate means to ends.
The vast bulk of science is
routine knowledge
routine applications
Brilliant hypothesis ) not part of run-of the mill
Exciting practitioners ) ordinary scientific
Romantic pursuits ) work
A critic of the new social science asked me once (Prof. Beer of Harvard, 1951) whether we should not produce as social scientists people who could equal Proust as a perceptive social scientist.
My response was indeed we could not. the aim of social science, as of all science, is to reduce to administrative rules a body of knowledge so that any dog can be a scientist. Even though he might never understand Proust. It is ignorance of what science is that produces much of the attitude of insufficiency. Prousts are rare. Science is for the multitude, for the social order, to supply somewhat elevated empirical orientations and operations.
February 1962 ?
"In that which is night to all beings, men of self-control are awake; and where all beings are awake, there is night for the contemplative who see."
Bhagavad Gita
