(Possibly this was duplicated in 1964???)
In all of the discussion and analysis of race relations and racial assimilation in America, I have yet to see attention given to this fact: owing to the semi-caste system in America, the Negroes have produced an authentic upper class - educated, professional, and financially stable. Such has not occurred in Latin America, for example, where assimilation has proceeded in various countries from the bottom up. As the U.S.A. caste system disintegrates, we can expect more rather than less rapid assimilation on all levels of culture than in Latin America. It would be interesting to examine the rates of miscegenation among different social strata to get biological confirmation of this theory. We would expect, for example, to have a number of established and notable North American families with some Negro relatives before the same condition occurs to the same degree in Venezuela, Brazil, and the West Indies.
* * * * *
December 1963
Birthday - Sunday
At eleven minutes past four of Roman time, the door to the front of the great DC8 of Alitalia closed, its passage way to the earth swung away, letting its passengers think to Bombay, Bangkok, Hongkong and Tokyo. De Grazia, the last to arrive, had breathed five minutes of Italian air, clear and sweet, and still in his great coat was in the London fog. He could see very few fellows aboard. The long cabin was mahoganied and browned in the plastics that accompanied the change from ships of sea to ships of air. it hardly trembled as the plane motors started, and no ship that ever sailed would have creaked so little in the hundred-mile gale that the tiny wing-sails gathered in on takeoff.
De Grazia felt for his wallet, his tickets, and his passport. They were there amidst the rubbish of travel, stubs to London museums, receipts for a suit bought, letters, cards, pens, addresses, a book for 1963, a book also for 1964, for the affairs and appointments that would create new rubbish for the pockets had to be numbered new by the peculiar practice of western culture.
A brief announcement in Italian, Japanese, and English corrected his error in believing the plane would stop en route to Bombay, and, true son of the air age, he thought no more than a moment of the fact that he would miss alighting in half the world. There would be no Cairo, no Beirut, nor Dharhran or Tehran or Karachi. In seven hours there would be Bombay and there was, five minutes before midnight Rome time, four o'clock in the morning of his birthday, Bombay time.
The airport of Santa Cruz came to life and light as the big plane lumbered in. For every one of the few passengers to descend there were a dozen porters, officials, and the "what-not" of the Orient. A company of Indonesian soldiers dressed for battle and carrying the United Nations insignia stood by, apparently waiting for planes to continue their movement back home to add to the troubles boiling over the new Malaysian Federation. Scarcely innocent birds of passage, thought De Grazia, as he turned to scrutinize them from one desk and another of the reception system organized for him and the others. The questions they asked were not what he expected, the cholera inoculations that had once annoyed him were not checked but a set of forms cooperatively produced by five different agents were finally made out to accompany his solitary bottle of whiskey. His customs examiner, a solicitous and cordial man, asked for contraband of all kinds, but as soon as De Grazia's face assumed the reflective cast of the honest respondent, he hastily supplied a negative answer, and went on that way until of course by his own broaching and waiving the belongings passed through.
There was alas the matter of De Grazia's major suitcase. The despatch case that carried his precious notes was there in hand with a parcel of cigarettes and books, but shortly it was evident the valise with everything else was absent. The Indian agents of Alitalia searched high and low. De Grazia himself was transported to the plane, refueling for Bangkok, and one after another climbed a ladder and peered into the several holds where the thing might have been. To no avail. It lay in Rome still, victim of the swift transfer of its owner from one plane to another. A cable would be immediately sent to Rome, The Case might arrive with an Air India plane due Monday morning. De Grazia could not understand why he was not angrier. it was probable that he was so experienced a traveler, with a Buddhistic view of belongings. Somehow, one would wash, eat, shave, and dress. if the bag never reappeared, goods would multiply to take its place. With condolences and 'good nights' he entered a little bus and sat besides the driver. it was 05:30 in Bombay as the vehicle moved onto the highway. The Indian world was stirring.
As everywhere in the world where people have little to do, they get up early. Quietly they squatted along the road, faint shapes of white and black in the dark. A boy was jogging along rapidly in our headlights. An animal pulled a cart. Two men pulled and pushed a cart. Another man was jogging along, lithe and fast. he had perhaps miles to go. A line stood before a washhouse. A few cars and trucks shone their lights. The sky was faintly lighter as buildings moved in upon us. The bare feet and skinny brown legs of India were forming dimly and multiplying. People rose from the pavements, lifting from their shrouded sleep like moths. About them stepped the awake ones, their cloths neatly swung about from the night to day position. Water poured over hands and faces from tin cups. Tea was brewed in little caves and drunk by clusters of men and boys. Purveyors of beans and peas and nuts were open for business. The homeless were abroad another day.
The car swung onto Arthur's road and made several halts to enquire. Finally the right block of buildings was discovered, Ghasvala Buildings at 493, and De Grazia, who had nowhere in particular to go but thought he might as well start with his student's relative, descended onto the street. Despite his loss of baggage, he felt like a man encumbered with possessions as he moved with his driver in and out of doorways and alleys, among indeterminate sleeping forms and piles of refuse. Up three flights of stairs in building number three with three companions now and there was the door of Daniji Merchant, brother-in-law of Romesh Shah.
Daniji let the strangers in. He was just awakening and must have been surprised. "I thought you would write," he said calmly, with no chagrin to be found in his voice or manner." "Come in."
De Grazia walked in from the small balcony to the room where the family lay upon floor mats. A small boy raised a black head from the doorway, and popped it back beneath his cover. "That is a poor boy. His family was starving and we took him. Ali helps my wife.'
De Grazia placed his dispatch case and parcel on a couch and shook hands. "I will wait for you on the balcony," he said and stepped out again. Daniji's wife stirred. Daniji began to change from his pajamas. De Grazia faced out and watched the dawn come red. The color rose over a train station across a yard. White figures flitted in and out of trains. People moved in the alleyways below. he could make out some standing, some squatting, some going in and out of lean-tos, apartments, shacks, several old automobiles, men brushing out their mouths with fingers and water, others splashing themselves, women wetting their faces and drying themselves on their saris, then wrapping the saris carefully around their bodies and shoulders. Much activity and yet quiet as could be save for the sliding and clacking of the wooden electric trains. The sky was light blue, the sun up with only the faintest escort of fine clouds. Signs in English and Hindi could be made out.
"Do you want to wash your mouth?"
"No". De Grazia had no toothbrush. it was in the case.
"I would like hot tea more than anything."
"My wife will make the tea now."
"We have two and a half rooms. It is good for Bombay. We came in two years ago and I paid 6000 rupees to get in and pay 60 rupees a month in rent."
The rooms had running water. A two-burner gas plate on the floor cooked and heated water. The toilet was a separate little room with a hole in the floor and a tank that flushed the hole. a wash room held the faucets and a drain in its pavement. There De Grazia stripped off the layers of his London clothing and bathed deliciously from a large tin cup, dipped into heated water and poured over himself. When he emerged, he wore a shirt, trousers and slippers. he felt as an Indian should feel in the glorious mornings of Bombay's January. His skin was near the air for a change. His muscles could flex against a thin cover of clothing. he was still alive at the morning of his 45th year.
His tea came at the hands of the black-haired boy, a beautiful boy with an angelic loving face, round, snub-nosed, and pretty teeth to smile with. For half an hour again De Grazia leaned on the balcony rail watching the mass of India emerging into the day. He thought of a letter he had written aboard the plane to Jill and wondered whether his family had arrived well in Princeton two days before. He recalled the snatches of Baudelaire and Rilke on death that he had read in the air.
Sandwiched between them was the pamphlet on the conclusive moment of truth he typically got when he read something, he had coined a triple program to reform the congressional staffing system. it will be that way in the book: Committees should divide staff into operational and research. The first should be administered by the chairman. The research staff should be governed by the Committee in its collective capacity, each member presenting periodically his proposals for the studies to be performed and a research budget to be agreed upon for the whole session, as in a research organization in a university or executive agency. The Legislative Reference Division of the Library of Congress should answer all simple factual inquiries of committees, and should maintain a roster of experts, in and out of government from which the congressional committee should select its long-term and temporary professional and clerical assistance.
His conscience bothered him once again over the book. Most of the ideas were on hand, but a chapter had yet to be written. He must write the whole inside of two months. His mind moved uneasily into the future and from Bombay. He thought of Stephanie and longed to see her. She brought him back to India. How could she have endured Indonesia and Malaysia. She is so much of Manhattan and yet can travel in terra deserta with a handbag and no food worthy of the name for weeks.
Daniji came out on the balcony and offered his shaving equipment so De Grazia shaved. he rubbed on some of Daniji's hair tonic too, as urged and in amusement. "Good for the Hair and Brain" it said. Nor did brain mean only scalp in Indian English. He remembered his Indian Students and their ideas. A lotion could help the brain (sic) even though it came out of some horrifying vat of unknown fats in Calcutta. His hair was black and lustrous now, and stank of nothing he had ever smelled before or cared to smell. But he liked the idea of it and was pleased with the smooth tan face topped by heavy black that faced him in the mirror.
Plans for the day had to be made. It was four o'clock by Rome and nine o'clock by Bombay..
"You can sleep here. We often have friends," said Daniji,
"No, thank you. I must have a writing table and spill my papers around." De Grazia stooped down to offer a finger to Daniji's year-old baby boy. A refusal of hospitality is a matter of great delicacy. "Also my habits are upset. For a couple of days I will be sleeping at odd times and up at others. You would be disturbed."
Daniji accepted the notion. They would go out to find a place, and then walk about the city. Little was open on Sunday.
Very little. The University and its hostels were closed. Alitalia was closed. The shops were shut. But no matter. There turned out to be enough to do to make the day interesting and conclude it well.
First came the hotel. The best hotel, the Ambassador, was too expensive, 43 rupees, over 8 dollars. They walked out and down along the bay front. The Sea Green Hotel stands there, among other structures of half a dozen stories, balconied, half a block in thickness front and side. There a room could be had for 23 rupees, a good room, large, light, with a balcony looking past a sturdy palm to the sea. The bath was next door and to be shared with another room. Good enough. Even better when it appeared that not just breakfast but all meals were included. Not to mention tea on arising and tea at 4 o'clock. What mattered the several giant cockroaches that scampered away when the tall-boy was opened. Jill would have screamed in that strangled disgusted way that he came to know as her cockroach cry in the old days in Chicago.
The hotel was called first grade, first of three grades, it developed. The waiters were kind and superfluous attendants abounded, each working at half or less efficiency but in good spirits. A broad-faced dignified man of fifty in khaki shirt and shorts settled down in a little corridor room off of De Grazia's Room number two and seemed thereafter to be present twenty-four hours a day. He helped swat a couple of the larger roaches and whisked them off with his little flick broom. He kept the room and the bathroom from being impossibly and repellently dirty. He provided matches. He was most obliging. So was the greyed old waiter in white who served seriously and devotedly the numerous teas and meals of the day.
Best of all De Grazia was cool and at peace in his room. He began to scribble his journal into a nice red book he had bought in Florence, and after lunch he napped comfortably on the clean sheet of a cot by the balcony. And when he returned at night after dinner and a brief walk on the bay-side of the street, he could peaceably continue his scribbling and worked at it from 10 PM to Midnight.
Lunch was taken with Daniji at one o'clock. The two men had ambled through the Bombay Sunday forenoon. They had visited the Museum of Indian antiquities and natural history, and had sat for a while in a cold air-conditioned restaurant where De Grazia satisfied exactly his hunger for lime juice and yogurt. There was little purpose to exhaust oneself on the whole of the museum, so the first floor alone was covered. From this it would appear that the British had taken more than they had left for the natives, for the British Museum collection on India, viewed only three days before, was more abundant and rich. A final judgment had to await another visit. To De Grazia the most interesting discovery of the museum was the realization that Buddha entered upon his first several centuries of life as a powerfully built young man, sometimes almost slender, never the fat bulging figure of his more recent representations. Had the Indian concept changed radically in keeping with a fundamental change of culture and personality?
When teatime came, De Grazia awoke from his nap, and Daniji returned to visit him. It was near dark and they went off to the gates of the Indian Film Exhibitions where Daniji's wife, the baby and the little boy were waiting. The Exhibition was entered by large gates in the best of Hollywood Rajah style, lit by neon and naked bulbs. Large signs proclaimed the main years of great movies of companies unknown to De Grazia. Each company had a booth, small or perhaps very large, and projected films or arrayed pictures in black and white such as advertised films in the entrance of American theatres in the 1920s. Loudspeakers carried publicity and at one point the names of a delegation of the USSR visiting the Exhibition, repeated ten times -- a director of films, an actress, an official, and another official. One never saw them but their supposed presence may have elevated the occasion
A throng of Indians pressed into the gates and flowed through the grounds. orderly, good-natured, naive, the mass examined every detail, every exhibit. A thousand looked up patiently at a screen where a comedy à la Charlie Chaplin played. Then the film exhibition turned into a domestic arts and a household goods display. The booths carried powdered coffee and tea. "Only the single moment and your coffee will be prepared to drink." Raw vegetables graters. Kashmir scarves. Saris by the thousands. Bolts of cloth. Rugs. Knives. De Grazia bought a crude flick-knife for the switch-blade aficionados of his family. He admired otherwise only the exhibition of some hand worked tiles, where a good artist had slipped in somehow among the many and painted delicate fish in waters of light pink, blue, and green, and the boys and men who concocted a kind of culinary outrage against sanitation, consisting of an edible leaf onto which were wiped a series of mashed vegetables and spices, quite indistinguishable as they existed in a set of little cans once used for other food. He wished to try one but could not afford the time to get sick, and Daniji was quite discouraging. He resolved, however, to do the honors with one of the street vendors elsewhere in the city who, he had noticed, carried their pastes and pinches in stainless steel and even mock silver cans.
Most of the crowd was male. Almost no one was alone. Almost no one except the announcers and hawkers spoke English. By eight forty-five the many acres were crowded with people of every caste and sect. There were practically no police, nor could one imagine why there should be. In the whole day, De Grazia had seen only one act of physical aggression, this by the occupational archetype of the aggressor, a taxidriver.
The crowd exiting with Daniji's family was still small, but De Grazia was far from being entranced with the great Indian Film Exhibition and wished to dine and read and write in the comfort of his room. All of which he did, casting an eye from time to time over the sidewalk traffic along the ocean and the placid sea beyond. the tide was in, the moon was full, the traffic dwindled to nothing finally save those few quiet presences that make India forever unmistakably a land of people.
Second Day, Monday
He opened his eyes wide to the morning when the batman knocked with the tea. All over the world, man, woman and child open eyes. The wicked eye. Man the exploiter of the planet awakes, lies for a few moments inert. The Earth trembles expectantly. It blurs and waivers. It knows not what to expect new from this animal stretched out in potential, readying to rise. Why couldn't he have stayed asleep?
This one plotted an immediate assault upon Alitalia for the suitcase that was missing. He did it between reading snatches of Baudelaire, watching the sea, showering and shaving, for no one could be presumed to be at the office before nine. At nine o'clock the first call went in. More followed. The manager had to be agitated and finally he was. He could not reach his man at the airport. Daniji came and De Grazia went with him to the office appearing unexpected and grim-visaged before the manager. The manager explained that he would gladly call Rome if he would not have to wait a week to get the call through. He pressed as many buttons as he could and sent as many peremptory inquiries as he could. (Have some coffee? Not Espresso to be sure.) Finally he announced that the bag had not come by Air India at 5 AM. Who knows where it was> maybe it was still in London? De Grazia, out of long experience, suggested the nagging and simple-minded idea of calling the agent at the airport again to ask. The manager did. The bag had arrived. So had a telefax from Rome saying it was on the Air India plane. De Grazia with Daniji had still to go to the airport, where all was cordiality, quiet, and helpfulness, and the great bag found its way into the Sea Green Hotel, and De Grazia changed his clothes and counted his money.
"What would you like to buy?" asked Daniji at lunch, while they discussed the exchange of currency. De Grazia had no shopping list. he had a few ideas -- Brahma in creation, Madras ties, a Kashmir rug, couch coverings, whatever might strike the fancy. They went to several stores operated by the government. There was very little of interest save in bed coverings. Of these many were well-made, hand embroidered in traditional Indian patterns, especially the Manipur, and prices at 12 to 20 rupees for a single bed and 20-36 for a large bed. De Grazia bought a dozen of them. He also liked two Kashmir rugs one 5 x 7 and another 4 x 6 feet, and had them put aside until he should send a cheque from America later (his real reason for the delay being to consider the purchases, which amounted to $200, more carefully). Saris and cotton coverings -- these were the only apparent objects of beauty produced by contemporary India. Very little is imported, which is as it should be for a country struggling to develop self-sufficiency, but little has been done to develop export possibilities. As in underdeveloped countries generally, India does not know what it has that is of value elsewhere. And so long as its import restrictions are too tight, no one save a few bureaucrats can experience what the world buys and sells.
They walked then to the University of Bombay where we found part of the Department of Politics busily putting together the mimeographed papers that were to be presented at the Conference on Public Opinion and Leadership beginning Saturday. My paper was not yet among them. But Miss Professor Chairman A was happy to see De Grazia and exclaimed that he was the first to arrive and was a good sign. De Grazia thought that she was probably a difficult person but had certainly been beautiful when young and even now at fifty or so had some grace and beauty of feature. He met others and picked up his mail. There was a letter from Ted Gurr asking for criticism of a questionnaire on documentation retrieval that was to be sent to a sample of social scientists. Also received was the December issue of ABS devoted largely to the Frontiers of Legal Research. Its illustrations were exceedingly well chosen, obviously by Livio Stecchini. Those on the cover contained various geometric designs from a 16th century Italian treatise defining "scientifically" the law of [word indecipherable]. the issue too had come out in good time, December 14, the earliest of the year. It would be still a while before the magazine would issue properly on the 28th or so of the prior month. Finally the mail contained a tentative glossary of terms used in the Index of the monthly bibliography for De Grazia's criticism and revision, and a letter from Erika asking for a check to cover Sebastian de Grazia's travel expenses to Florence.
De Grazia repaired to the hotel and wrote in reply to all except the glossary inquiry. He wrote to Jill and to his daughters in Florence. Then he walked a half-mile to post his letters. He noted with satisfaction Ted Gurr's report that Chancellor Stoddard had resigned, effective almost immediately. Stoddard had been continuously unfriendly to De Grazia's suggestions ever since taking office. He had managed the University tightly, but had accomplished little in new directions and blocked expressions of initiative and inspiration from a number of points. Nothing indicated a forced resignation. Yet S. was never one to resign power. An explanation would have to wait. Dean Niles of the Law School was to be the new Chancellor. De Grazia had no opinion on his merits for the new post. Whatever the applied science of administration pretends to, it was foolhardy to predict a future relation unless one had studied such a situation closely and knew the man involved well. De Grazia could say neither.
Walking back to the Sea Green Hotel, Daniji met a client and introduced De Grazia. The man was at one of the numerous Pan stands that dot the streets of Bombay, and it would not do but that De Grazia should have his first pan. While his pan was being mixed, Daniji, a model of personal cleanliness and careful diet, praised the pan man as the client's regular supplier and the man, a printer by trade, certainly looked healthy and lively enough. Out of deference to his innocence, De Grazia's pan was without chewing tobacco. But the excruciating elements were otherwise there, wrapped in gold foil that was to be eaten too and garnished with betel nuts. While De Grazia munched horribly on the concoction, he murmured words of appreciation, rather garbled to be sure, since his salivary glands were gushing water into his mouth and he didn't know whether he should spit or swallow, eventually doing both. "Is this supposed to give you more power with women?" he asked, as he heard the other advantages of pan extolled. The Indians laughed and of course agreed. For whatever is good in one respect must, to an Indian, make also some positive contribution to that universal potency they so much seek. Then he added wryly, more for his own benefit than the Indians, who were usually shy on such subjects, "Not that I can use such power at present!"
They reached the Hotel, Daniji left, and De Grazia washed and taxied to the Queen's Hotel facing the Taj Mahal Hotel, where he met Prof. John and Janet Chapman for supper. Chapman was a political philosopher, an acquaintance of Sebastian, and had been cordial at the first encounter in the afternoon at the University of Bombay. He had said, à propos of a group of Indian professors, "They are contemptuous of politicians and officials, but want to give everything to the government to do." De Grazia felt that he would be worth knowing.
He was. Janet, his wife, furthermore was. A woman who once had borne a bad complexion, she had probably become more attractive through the years, her intelligence aiding and abetting certain naturally attractive features, long shapely legs, a fairly lithe body, a pert face, a great way of speaking -- female, tough, and low -- and wavy short bobbed light brown hair. John was handsome, but with a slight indecision of feature and manner, a few more pounds than could be well accommodated, and perhaps a too sustained cordiality.
Out was the third member of the family who, when she turned up, proved to be Perry, nine years old, insouciant, self-reliant, cool, pretty yet a bit pudgy at that age. De Grazia was impressed favorably by the restraint exercised by the Chapmans in fretting and fuming over Perry, a girl likely to stray and ventures. It was unusual for parents, especially parents of an only child.
Chapman filled up De Grazia with advice and instruction. De Grazia glanced at Janet's new book on Soviet Real Wages 1928-1963. Her conclusions painstakingly developed were that either real wages had gone up 10 - 20% or they had gone down by some 10%. In either case, the Soviet Union progress has not been remarkable.
The Chapmans had found that living well in India, even on $16,000 for the year, which however included several thousands for transportation, not a simple matter. Their apartment at Queen's Hotel overlooked the large piazza and Gateway to India. It was spacious and in every sense adequate, but cost them over $300 per month. He had undertaken to lecture at Canberra on the way home to make the year come out financially even.
Chapman spoke disparagingly of USIS and AID operations in India. He was unfavorably impressed by the affairs arranged for visiting Americans by the two agencies. The Information Service fed a fairly dull diet to a few people. One AID expert chose, as an example of efficiencies that might be introduced, a manpower-saving system of cleaning floors. What he would do with the crew of men and families dispossessed of their menial but precious work remained at issue. The Chapmans, in a key that De Grazia came later to hear from other Americans, ascribed many of India's troubles to a fundamental apathy to change and furthermore believed that far fewer Indians live lives of hardship, at least in a subjective sense, than the Indian leaders gave the world to believe. This is of course heresy to neo-liberalism and socialism, which have held dearly the premise that the masses are starving, rebellious, and demanding.
Dinner with them was at the Taj. De Grazia found the food little better than at the Sea Green Hotel, but satisfactory. Afterwards little Perry had the temerity to draw a free-hand map of how he was to get home, dissolving definitively the adult ramblings on the subject. Following her map, but deviating when he reached the sea, De Grazia found himself lost and a wanderer in midnight Bombay. After an hour of passing over Bombay settling into the depths of night, he hailed a cab and went to bed.
What did Bombay look like on his second day? Boulevards and arches in the style of the end of the Bourbon empire. A pomp set up by the weakening old order now ridicules the young and weak successor order. Its old buildings are handsome, something like Honolulu's old areas. Winds can enter. Shade is provided by slats and overhangs of wood, stone, and concrete. The new buildings of Bombay are more handsome and original than the modern buildings of London, which are depressing and uninspired boxes of stone and sheet glass, uncolored, unornamented. Here human life thrived in the sheer struggle for existence in the humid and hot zone. To every man, woman and child goes a cloth, a swatch that hangs differently with the hours of the day. The breezes could be sweet and clean for there is yet little industry proportionate to the airs of the sea. They were so, save when garbage leadened the winds with vile odors and a stink of piss came from curbs and doorways, the latrines and broken sewers. Fishing smacks stand off the Bay-front like skeletal hungry dogs of dark grey. Crows, sparrows, and pigeons abound. Nowhere have crows found so fine a home as in Bombay. Judging from their noises, appearance and conduct, they were the same characters as accompanied begrudged the life of American farmers. The cows were disappearing from Bombay. Only occasionally was the traffic disrupted and the noisy scene broken up by the sweet-faced calm creature of tan and white. Tolerated less and less for reasons scarcely admirable functionally, if perhaps absurd religiously, they will soon have left Indian mankind to their miserable pursuit of shabby western materialism.
There was labor available for every little act. Ultimately labor was subdivided not on the principle of efficiency, but on the principle of how many pieces and men the work can be broken down into. The Chapmans' apartment was being painted, for example. For this task several types of workmen appeared, supervised by an excessively occupied couple of men. One group washed; another sanded, another painted rough, another rolled on the paint. When one group finished, and only then, could another begin and if the second were occupied, the first could not continue into the next phase.
Waiters, batmen, servants, washers, sweepers, clerks and laborers have introduced with the consent of the culture a thoroughly considered system of parceled tasks. Its existence is scarcely noted by scholars, by the public, or by the workers. Yet it is a fact of large significance for it is conventionally taught and believed that the division of labor is introduced as a great step forward in economic development. Industrialization, wrote Adam Smith, was made possible by the division of labor, nationally introduced.
True perhaps for an England of the 17th and 18th century but even there and certainly here, the division of labor newly introduced actually substitutes for one used in the past. Even in England, and of course in India, the division of labor that had existed had to be reduced in order for a new one to be introduced. Owing to a certain self-awareness tied into theological disputes and Renaissance and Enlightenment positivism, the changes that might be effected by a controlled division of labor were more quickly appreciated and applied. And built into a science of economics.
The ideas that the division of labor is a new idea, an objective concept, a neutral principle of administrative and industrial operations are wrong. The question must be, as always in the study of administration and values, whose division of labor is to be applied to whose ends?
Yet differences within the pre-existing division system must have great influence upon the rapidity of the changes brought in by a developing mode of division. Given its great surplus of labor, and an exceedingly fine pre-existing system of division of labor encompassing many more of life's activities, the new Indian division of labor may be delayed and may not even be the solution to India's problems of economic development. Again are not Gandhi's theories better than Adam Smith's or Marx's?
Last Day of the Year
Having too much to do to continue this narrative, I am turning it over to the hero himself to speak in his own words:
"On the last day of the old year 1963, I did little that was exceptional except be in India, which was exceptional enough. I bought hand loomed cotton bed coverings, tried to get whiskey, discussed foreign exchange practices with a money-changer, listed to Daniji and the Chapmans talk about India, made a few observations of my own and celebrated a quiet New Year's Eve with the Chapmans watching the cheering crowd, lights and firecrackers at the Gateway to India.
I began the day by writing to Stephanie. No letter had come from her since Sicily. I told her that I had bought her a little statue of woman tempting man who wished to contemplate through eternity and that the form of the statue had the two in a rather compromising position, but she should feel that I thought she was all woman alone; she was great in her femininity but was of extraordinary intellectual virtue as well. I said that the tides of our relations were perhaps running, but in an unknown direction.
(I should be writing about what happened in Bombay, I know, but what happens is in oneself. I only remember a strong sensation upon writing the letter, as strong as those felt over the Bombay scene. Must my account be so documentary? Look, I have even failed even as I have begun, for it was not on the morning of New Year's Eve but on the morning of the first day of the New Year that I wrote this letter. What does it matter except to show that the more important thing is not the division of life into days?)
One would have very little need for the progression of dates if it were not for interacting with separately controlled external events. I recalled my error for instance, when I remembered buying the gift this day, not on New Year's Day, which saw me on the road to Poona.
Only in one shop, towards the middle of the afternoon, did I find the gods in their creative act. Otherwise the curio shops of Bombay produced a rather dull array of bronze and ivory Shivas, and family of Gods, poor daggers (save one with a jade handle, of the 16th century), and sundry trays and copper vessels.
I discovered too that the only shop in Bombay that carried men's clothing that would stand exhibition at home was ...[here the manuscript stops!]
1963
Mind Learning and Gut Learning
The nature of social science (and natural science) is usually conceived as a set of rational logico-empirical exercises . Facts are discovered; propositions are formed; and the knower is left to himself.
What is not realized is:
1) The "knower" immediately places the proposition in his
a) memory
b) system of memories and relations
c) consciousness
according to this previous evaluative posture respecting materials of the type of the proposition.
2) The "knower"adjusts his future behavior in relation to the proposition by a unique and personal system. This system bears an unknown (a priori) relation to the idealized logical-empirical system of science.
_________________________
(somewhere in 1963)
On the Comparative Description of Events
in different Times Periods (or Cultures)
to show the penetration of science in public discourse
e. g. Take popular essays of the Greek, Roman, Renaissance, 18th century French, modern Russian Soviet, Indian 16th century, American colonial, American civil war, American early 20th century, and TODAY
in:
essays
speeches in politics
how-to-do-it
poetry
journalism
art, music, theatre, criticism
political commentary
current historical reporting
natural phenomena explanation
Probably a clear contrast can be drawn in the same newspapers over a century (or similar language newspapers).
See e. g. attached music critique from Canton Telegraph
Journal, 1963
Security and experience are not to be imagined as specific actions or wishes. They are rather chosen as two great sweeping declines joining the mountains to the sea. They are chosen because they refer to the two most useful derivations out of the original inherited biological nature of man. They are universal human tendencies to act (whose "aims" are objectively S & SE) and to wish (consciously even if "repressed" or hidden or semantically indistinct). They are useful concepts because they appear to comprise on a more primitive level all the more concrete valuing activities of man -- loving, fearing, hating, desiring, conquering, agreeing, etc. They are useful because they (and their further sub-concepts) can be seen to lead into the major problems and the major institutions of government.
Therefore it is useless and wrong to attack these two concepts on grounds that they are intended to be instincts, or the only instincts, or visible forms of valuing, or that they are so simple as to be useless. Regarding this most sensitive spot, this last allegation, let it be repeated that they are intended to carry natural animal man into human activities, human mobility, and human community, there to branch out into numerous and useful sub-concepts.
Working retrospectively, we say that philosophy and policies that keep alert to the problem of the essential balancing of security and experience will to a degree succeed in educating men and establishing institutional life.
Are we condemned to finding what we are, i. e. our nature, in order to say that something is also what we should be? In particular matters, no. In major matters, yes. But the point is not an argument in a circle; it is a unity of conception of the world: the world is man's mind and man's mind is the world. Man's nature is what should be, for what should be is man's nature. And what should be is indefinite -- so what can be said about it is limited (whence we get a prescription for a natural free society) and his nature (and what should be) is also contradictory (and this is the second great justification of the free society).
Are we not then free, speaks the devil's voice or the relativist's voice, to prefer what we are not to what we are. We are, but only in a logical sense: that is, we set up a rule of logic that says: for everything that can be affirmed, there is by necessity a negative. This is logically so, then, but really false. And he who sets out to be diabolic gives by implication proof of the affirmative -- especially, as so happens, his act is self-destructive.
[Marginal note:] Note: my anti-mechanistic philosophy is owing to the machine potentially providing half or more of the total spectrum of experience.
These two wishes of man are more connectable to reality and policy than, say, the famous Freudian life-instinct (Eros) and Death-instinct, and yet say much of what he hoped to say there. ([Marginal note:] cf. Life-death instincts of Freud.) And they are more dynamic than the goal-values set up by Harold Lasswell -- power, respect, affection, income, enlightenment ([Marginal note:] cf. values of Lasswell). These, it is apparent, are more useful as measuring scales than as description of forces. They are useful static classes of comparing end results and making statistical projections of other conditions and future conditions from present distributions. We say that the particular set of conditions and distribution of these values are determined by the more basic shaping and forming of the desire for security and new experience, both of which can readily take on numerous representations in each one of the Lasswell categories such as power, respect, or affection. That is, man can seek a security of power and an experience of power; a security of affect and an experience of affection.
[Marginal note:] primal needs, human needs, political needs.
We use the Freudian ideas of techniques of focus. Man interacts with environment (including other men) to shape a satisfactory balance of his human needs. He achieves some kind of balance by continuous experimental or compelled displacements, identifications, and rational policies. He is sick when his process is frustrated and unending, chaotic, never tension-balancing.
( Somewhere in 1963)
Memo from Metron Inc.
To Study role and interview methodology
Research Idea:
How to discover the variety and flexibility of roles a leader assumes (or follower for that matter):
Hypo: x Individuals have from x to y roles which they have difficulty in assuming in relating to situations 1, 2, ... n and that these deviations can be ascertained and norms discovered by
A) Interviews by interviewers trained in other contexts to elicit different known roles in others. (e. g. "Miss Q arouses the beast in me" and therefore Miss X should do the same in subject A -- and the responses of Subject A to interview with Miss Q ought to be all or some modified by the role she incites him to assume, then follow with other role-stimulating interviewers).
2) Then cf. Subject A's role responses with B, C, ... n.
_________________________
1963
I say: reality is perceptually relative.
You respond: reality is one and we perceive it correctly or incorrectly.
You say in argument: if reality is perceptually relative then one can say the world is square and that must be true.
I say: the statement "the world is square" is only a disbelieved statement from the beginning. If one says the world is square or iron is softer than water and really believes it, then these statements have a functional truth.
You say: But then we know those "truths"are impossible to believe without causing a host of accidents.
I say: Yet but all truth is limited, in ways we cannot know. A functional truth has obviously limits, some of which we know. What we can say is that A's "truth" won't have the same set of relations and consequences as B's "truth" or your "truth".
etc.
__________________
1963
Plot of Play
Practically everyone trying to get a "new" perspective on anti-Semitism by making people "identify" with the problem, do so by having Gentile act as a Jew, e. g. Gentlemen's Agreement, etc.
Much more insight to be had by a Jew joining the Gentiles. True, this is "done" countless times but not as a true, objective, switch.. Rather people try but do not really try to escape their Jewishness by mixing with Gentiles. Often the ones who write about such experiences write from disillusion, unacceptance, despair; one never hears of the successful "passing" or of a calm, objective, deliberate masquerading in order to see what the Jews are like and what Gentiles are like in their attitudes to each other.
1963
I thought yesterday, when I heard an infant crying next door, how all infants sounded alike. I wondered whether they sound alike around the world. And when do they begin not to sound alike? Could we determine the beginnings of their human character from the change in their cries? Are their cries different in different countries and groups too. Does the Hindu baby sound exactly like the English baby in the beginning and then do they change their wails, pitch, duration, intensity and rhythms?
To study the matter would not be difficult. Let a tape recorder be carried from one country and class to another, collecting the sounds. And then let the sounds be classified and analyzed. An electronic analyzer might work better than the ear and mind on the regular processing of data.
___________________________________________
(somewhere in 1963)
Political Order: Introduction
We are at a point in history where we must determine whether we can or cannot mobilize the forces necessary to achieve a free intl and domestic society, i. e. we cannot blithely urge the effort unless we believe it can be successful.
_____________________
(somewhere in 1963)
Jefferson denounced an aristocracy of birth in favor of an aristocracy of talents; instead of either, we have gotten an aristocracy of activism. Whosoever works energetically and persistently enough towards a post will achieve an approximation to it.
1963
"Test of the Astronaut"
on the discrepancy between the myth and the accomplishment
cf. Pegasus
cf. Lindbergh, etc.
Little independence, little of what I am except the enjoyer of experience. But I must submit to the greatest test = to take properly the gap between what I am and what people think I am and make me be..
________________
1963
Dewey et al. insist upon the origins of thought in the facing of obstructions and frustration. One great thought is, of course, God. Is it not possible that the idea of God came about as the result of cosmic catastrophe rather than developing out of minute uniform changes in the course of ages? I conceive it not only as possible, but as likely, that man would have a) not evolved and b) evolved but slowly in his social thoughts if he had not been subjected to some immense force that literally created him as Man.
Cf. mushroom experiments where a possible retraction of experience may be occurring. There is certainly an immense burst in the head along with the "intensifying of religiousness."
__________________
1963
Art as man's only complete work.
Death, misfortune, miscalculation, etc. all prevent closure.
Therefore :The adoration of art
The weak point of theories of incomplete art - modern (and ancient) too.
__________
1963
Leopold Meltzer from Chicago resolved to make a girl from every country. Story begins on 6. On 7 he got in much trouble. On 8 he got sick. On 9 he met by accident an American whore with whom he fell in love and married. End.
___________________
1963
Proper science of Public Policy
Much more important than the "discovery" of "truths" in this sense: the latter is more and more done well methodologically (exact, fine, etc.). The applied aspect is hit or miss. This queer business is explainable (professors control "objective" science; politicians and administrators control applied science). But it can be shown how a decided shift of scientific attention to the details of policy science (applied science) can result in much greater net gains to science and scientists (though with shareD power and greater risk).
(Somewhere in 1963)
Desk Encyclopedia of Social Science
System
Articles
Graphics
Bibliography (annotated and indexed)
Index of topics and relations
Dictionary of synonyms
Idealist
Phenomenological
Pragmatic (operational)
Pure and (applied - always with clear ethics: viz. suggested applications:
to do x, do y
to do z, do a,
etc.
$18.00
$25.))
2,000 pages of double columns x 1000 words = 2,000,000 words - 2 years
Writing staff of 5: 200,000 words per year per person
+ Editors Costs
5 research assistants and production office manager
2 typists 8,000
1 librarian 5,000
Add: Dictionary of practical synonyms = constructive equivalents of concepts terms etc. so that people can move about the fields of social science freely
e. g. class = stratification, mobility, reference group, role, etc.
small group: micro economics, face-to-face group, primary group, in-group,
start-cluster, club, etc.
(1963 and earlier)
Battle at Best pp. 209-10 Aug. 27 Paris (tell of Nov. 18 letter of Al re 2-day visit to Paris)
SLA Marshall claims to be of first group in Paris with Hemingway, Haskell and 6 others.
Looked down Champs-Élysées from Avenue Foch and saw HUGE banner reading something like
"HART SHAFFNER and MARX Welcomes You"
By next AM a French AA gunner from a battery next to Arc had shot the sign down.
He is mistaken or it must have been rehung. I came to Paris days (weeks?) later (??) on a visit and saw the banner flying. And it said: "The Paris Branch of HS & M Welcomes its Liberators".
HS & M = "Hart, Schaffner and Marx", clothiers from U.S.A.
"The Employees of Hart, Schaffner and Marx Welcome their Allied Liberators!"
Compare March of 2nd SS Panzer Division in East with March of 11th Panzer Divisions in West.
Also included to be scanned
Article on UNESCO (probably from ABS)
Travel ad for Stella Polaris, Grand Mediterranean Spring Cruise
