The Greek myth says Jupiter was the son who overthrew his father, Saturn. They called the planet by the name of the King of the Gods or the King by the planet. Why would so much myth surround a speck in the sky? Was there ever an episode in the heavens, threatening the Earth, that involved Saturn and Jupiter? Did it result in Saturn's being reduced and Jupiter, huge though it was, receding in space leaving a memory trace of great size in legend?
* * * * *
The folk myth is truth to its originators. It develops and changes with their experiences. There is no reason to believe, as is universally held, that myth is distinct from history. Myth is history, written by historians not of the Enlightenment and Positivist tradition. All the elements of myth as it is found -- and disbelieved -- in other times can be discerned in the writing of history today. Know then, the psychology of the writers of history, the authors of myth, and their epigoni, and you have the key to understanding history, whether of today or so-called myth.
* * * * *
Dad is feeling unwell today. He has so for a week. He gets dizzy. He believes himself to be dying. He is all well except for this disturbing symptom and a poor digestion. He cannot hear clearly, so it is difficult to say whether his mental faculties are a bit muddled. I think not. He is preoccupied with death. That disperses the faculties. He may be right. He may be wrong and it will pass.
* * * * *
Quantity is an aid to definition. If a word in scientific use is capable in abstraction of quantification or quantitative treatment, it is useful and not too dangerous. If not, it is suspicious.
* * * * *
Dad was feeling better this evening, but like a man coming out of a long dream he asked numerous questions in a half-joking innocence that showed he had forgotten some part of reality. "Are we here for good?" he asked mother. "Did we give up our place in Chicago?" "How many children does Miriam have?" He remembers ages ago in great detail but especially seems to have lost a little of his bearings of the last year. yet his eyes are clear now, no longer murky. His dizziness is gone.
I wonder what it was. Could the tetracycline prescribed by Blumenthal have had such an effect. Dad stopped taking them this morning, and his head cleared this afternoon, a week after beginning his spell and going onto four pills of it daily. (The drug was prescribed for curing sore glands on both sides of his neck and did cure that apparently.) Or was it an upsurge of arteriosclerosis, which Blumenthal detected a week ago. That too would have produced dizziness, loss of memory, and indigestion. What brought on the attack and sent it away? Who knows?
Mom is disturbed. I am helping them to buy a house too. Vicky came home beautiful and pleasant from Smith College and went back today. George Barrie came over for financial advice on a manufacturing business he is buying. Ted McNulty visited and we talked of his thesis on the manner in which social science is reported to the public. Livio came by and we talked of his fine new article on ancient measures, the Venus tablets, and catastrophism. I played squash with Ted yesterday and tennis with Paul today. I should have been writing a review of Russett's book on comparative national statistics. At least I read it and know roughly what I shall say. I should also have drafted the mss. of the Pilot Codex and Universal Reference system book. Furthermore I should have written the column on Topics and Critiques for the December ABS. Etc., etc... what can one do? I canceled my trip to Washington and called Carl Stover and Ed de Grazia to tell them I would not see them tomorrow morning. Perhaps I can write tomorrow here and in NYC. Carl reports that Jim Mitchell, who is a trustee of George Washington University, looks with interest [by] on my nomination for the presidency. Carl is calling Arthur Miller, who is on the Faculty Committee on the presidency, to discover his feelings. It was Miller who first discussed the question with Brother Ed.
Jill is rather irritable. She is good to everyone, but snaps at me a lot and sometimes at others. We argued more than enough today, though never in great heat.
Title for my American Government book
"The U. S. in the Modern World"
To bed at midnight after a feast at Letrain Restaurant on 50th & 1st Avenue with the Neumans and S's younger brother, Paul. But carafes of wine weigh heavily on the breast and I am awake.
I read Mahm's Selections from Early Greek Philosophy. I ask "What makes men think?" And, "If they must think, what tools do they bring to the task?"
It seems to me that the first may have a universal answer: "They think from fright, insecurity, passionate desire, and frustration. All of which has to be specified and applied to the particular objects and events that from moment to moment since the species emerged gave cause to think.
The question of the tools is more relative perhaps to the times, the objects, and the events. Perhaps, or perhaps there are universal forms that are applied, and even the distinction between what makes him think and how does he think are answered in unison.
But consider the imposing first big thoughts: "Where do babies come from? Where does the person go when he dies? What is the stranger by blood? Why must I not covet, or kill, or believe - in specified areas?"
Then come the secondary questions that we have to ask because except for a single generation of man, the rest must accept the thoughts and develop them apart from their source: What made man perceive and deify the heavenly bodies? (Something must have provoked this animation. I suspect it may have been a transference of [page separated by probably belongs here] earthly animism to the skies than unusual events occurred in the sky. The analysis of myth and early religion then should give us a history of what affected and provoked thought among men.) Since the basic motives, purposes and forms of behavior are present there -- most probably nearly all of them -- their study cannot be neglected. (Note how the whole world is tied together in early cosmogony. There must have been first a perception of these ties -- and then a delegation of actors and plot from earth to sea to sky to earth to sea, in unending cycle. But the skies were close in those days. The sun is always "close". So is the Moon. The other astral bodies are deduced to be close -- whatever the primitive mind can perceive must be close to him by definition. And if the heavenly bodies are activated, their connection with him, their closeness, is already a fact. It is more difficult by far for modern man to feel the heavens close in and therefore part of his family.
The phone wires have been busied by our talking of Dad's illness. Jill shouted at me that we boys were refusing to let an old man die in peace. She was quite willing to abet us, she exclaimed, wrong-headed though we were. But she is the wrong one. None of the Oppenheim-Lauderbach group can cope with emotions -- she and her siblings were not educated to do so and the trait suffuses her family tree. She is not without affection and emotion. It is that she represses it and when it kicks up strongly she feels panicky and lashes out in turn at the cause -- those who oblige her to have the feeling.
Of course, there is a rational side. Old people should not be aided and urged to exist in extreme pain or despite a loss of the major faculties. We owe to them what we do to all of our fellow men. If they fall into the water, they should not be presumed to be hopelessly drowning. Suppose we were to treat every difficulty in an infant's breathing as a sign of imminent death, and abandon it? Dad has suffered a sore throat, which has now been "cured", dizziness, and depression. He has a slight sense of unreality and asks questions about his whereabouts. His deafness hinders his comprehension and deepens his solitary confrontation of death. Is all this much? No. With all of this he is better than most men fifteen years younger. If there are reasonable means, or even unreasonable ones, for reversing some of the lapses or haling their progression, they should be taken. Why should hope be foolish, and hard-headed? Is not despair as much so? To Jill 's credit her behavior belies her attitudes -- I know too that her attitudes are the crust over her volcano of forlornness. I could tell her that for twenty-five years I have done for her what I am doing for my father now, lending life and hope. That such harbingers appear to the slipping souls as busybodies is a bad side-effect of their cures. But Jill is not all to one side. She is usually the "saved soul". In contradictory fashion, she tells me 'the thing to do now is to imagine all sorts of little services and errands that keep one running in and out of the folks' house!" Here is the contemptuous one - now a veritable busybody! But who wouldn't want her splashing her long legs and earnest face in and out of the door?
Date for Conference in NY Dec. 17, [1964] Thursday - January 4, [1965]
[Notation: 1966? ]
Tom Johnson. - Earl Voss - Carl Stover, National Institute of Public Affairs - Karl Deutsch, Yale - Morris Cohen, Clark U. - Oliver Garceau, E. Boothbay -- Al de Grazia, NYU - Ted Gurr, Res. Office, NYU - Ralph Goldman, San Francisco -- Gordon Tullock, Virginia -- Chas. Deckert, Purdue -- Bill Shore, New York Regional Plan Commission -- Pater Blau, Univ. of Chicago - Cornelius Neal Cotter, Wichita University -- Darell Powers, Washington, DC -- Bruce Russett, Yale University -- William Colman, Adv. commission in IG Relations -- Charles Hyneman -- Evron Kirkpatrick
November 14, 1964 Saturday 10:30 AM
I am playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the phonograph. Dad sits next to me in the sun of our splendid fall day. He looks at 81 years of age to be in perfect health, grey, sturdy, well-groomed in tweeds and a handsome cravat. But his memory is slipping around like the cargo of a ship reeling in a storm. He feels it too, and is dismayed and helpless. I dug out his hearing-aid that he had discarded in favor of hardness of hearing a year ago, and placed it on his ear. He likes the increased sound now. He asks me though: "Can you hear it?", meaning the phonograph. I say "Yes." He repeats his question, adding "Without the cord?" He believes the hearing-aid is needed to hear the music well. Or did he only at the moment he asked the question? His logic here and otherwise is excellent. But his mental command of objects is suffering. He has to reason out everything anew, with the help only of pieces of a shattered memory.
Sunday Livio Dad
Monday Dr B
Tuesday PU Library Hermitage
Wednesday Miller, Juliette, Print-out Lecture [mdya] Trimble
Thursday Plane Georgetown Diebold, Dichert, Theobald,
lunch Hutchings
Naisbitt - Ianni
Ed
Stover
Dinner - Rickover 1789 - story of it
Don Michaels Georgetown University
November 19, 1964 - Notes for Comment on talks by Dilbold and Theobald
Comment
I. Professor Deckert -- Both brilliant - Remarks / science - Political Action Protesters
1. Each age has its touchstone of immortal achievement and believes it is the summa for all time -- cybernetics is like the age of steam, the age of firearms, the age of the crossbow, the wheel, the carved flint. It is the age of immigration.
* We will not get to a "golden somewhere" thereby. Never
* Nor will we do more than build up huge piles of precedent and practices that will help us get where we wish to go.
* The machine is not intelligent, i. e. an intelligent machine is a contradiction in terms. It is only a more or less complicated way of begging the question. The answer is in the machine to begin with. "Surprises" come from our minds not having been fully prepared for the logical consequences of our own thoughts.
* As Ray Dechart says: there is much of purely verbal dispute in these matters.
* There is perhaps though a second line of defense -- the modern machine is, if intelligent, then not willful in a leading sense, i. e. it takes orders. Ultimately from someone who has, if not greater intelligence, then greater power (and I mean not horsepower but political power). The machine deters and confuses man, when it does not serve him. But assuming, and we must assume such, not argue, in a conference employing scientific practice, that God gives orders to man. There is no problem that the machine will interpose its will in-between. In non-deistic language, the more powerful and purposive machine will dominate the less powerful and random one.
2. No doubt this aura surrounding cybernetics is like the French deputy's idea. Poincaré: we spend so much money on it, Geodesy must be a very good thing.
3.
4. To speak of Deckert
[Note: on back of the above note, was a letter from George H. Dunne dated November 11, 1964 - can be scanned]
II. Mr. Theobald
1. i am relieved that i had not to prepare a formal paper following because i agree quite almost quite. --
2. No disagreement with fact that society will transform.
But the implication
-- Bureaucratic central order is possible in 100 years
cf Venezuelan potential with say populace hungering outside the gates of the castles in olden times.
3. Nor agreement with crude dole system
Education will be the great instrument not to teach but to perform a social function.
4. But this feature of education has to be brought about by either
a. Statism ( Need to revise drastically salary potential and
b. Voluntarism ( and salary rises of men and women in prime of life
5. All other reforms can be done by these 2 means also. We need the will to invent a voluntaristic society.
No coincidence that we begin and end with the problem of will.
It is will not intelligence that is the crux of the machine problem.
It is will not intelligence that is the most difficult problem of statecraft, the problem of the govern[ment]
[On back of paper - a letter from Robert Theobald 400 Central Park West New York NY 10025:]
Dear Professor de Grazia:
I must apologize for this being so late but a number of crises got in the way. it will be given substantially as written, perhaps with a few minor stylistic changes.
Sincerely yours, R. Theobald
[Written (not very clearly) over the letter and in the margin:]
Agree on most. Disagree on social solution offered (on various grounds). Not [salvicer] in re fact. Yet we can have a broken-down society based quite on cybernetics (e. g. Venezuela could be run by a few managers and in giant factories -- while the populace hungers about the gates. This is a very old system.
Present ideas of Education as answer to instruction and machine in an indirect not direct sense. Presents the crux of the social problem in the advanced countries: Voluntarism not Statism.
In re voluntarism, the need to revise working years' pay far upwards.
Talking with Cathy. I urge her again to read Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Hard-head resists the suggestion. She unconsciously (almost consciously) sets up barriers to suggestion from me, even while she knows that I am reasonable and she would benefit far out of the proportion of effort entailed. it is irritating, but common behavior. Will she ever outgrow it? Betty Barrie is still fighting her mother at 52 years of age -- They are both sick though. Cathy is normally sick.
A relation between belief in a fearsome God and personal anxiety is present today, micro-psychological studies agree. Would a study of ancient (and recent) history show the same? And would the changing Biblical versions of God be related to proximity or distance from catastrophes -- the great cosmic ones and the wars and famines? Would this help indicate the chronology of catastrophes? Every viewer of second-rate movies of the South Seas knows how the natives are terrorized and in fear of god when the volcano erupts.
* * * * *
Another one-act Play
"The Day that Oswald Shot General Walker"
Setting: New York apartment on West side
Liberal group cocktail party
Editorial
Unfortunate
Misguided "lad"
Take up a contribution for his defense
W. had it coming.
cf. Warren Report on K. assassination.
* * * * *
Jill dreamed I had written her, after many years of cohabitation, that I had decided against marriage; "a calm letter", she said, "reasonable." She tore it up, but then wanted to reread it. But the pieces wouldn't fit together; an oval piece had nowhere to go. Then parts of the handwriting seemed not to be mine. She was most irritated at the task, not so much at me, or even at my idea.
I thought about her dream and decided that here was more evidence that philosophy is helpless to place the world in a hierarchy of greater and lesser values and to get people to observe the ranking. More marriages are broken by halitosis than politics. Yet who would ever say that the fate of the great society is a lesser reason for discord than bad breath? Our desire for "rationality" (is it at bottom a cry for conformity, an urge to control?) makes us search and preach the "important" over the "petty" despite all evidence to the contrary. The dream easily puts aside the "major" so-called and puts in its place the obviously "more important" at a certain point in time and space, the subjectively important.
* * * * *
I am angry. The boys leave the basement door open. The cold wind enters. The furnace goes on. Is it better to discipline them to close it or to put a heavy spring on it to close it automatically?
A student at Bryn Mawr was discovered in her dormitory bed with a boy from Haverford, Cathy reported to us at breakfast this morning. She is in for the weekend, beautiful and a trifle sad because Dante has not come from Italy yet. The girl was not expelled from college, however, because there was no rule forbidding her conduct. Moreover, no rule will be promulgated because it would imply that such affairs are conceivable at Bryn Mawr. How funny to see a bureaucracy caught in the toils of respectability! The regime of the law says no one may be punished save for the violation of a knowable principle. The principle may not be written into law because it represents an embarrassment.
Of course, other factors may well have entered. Was the girl otherwise "good" confirming to rules, caught off guard, a victim of circumstances, a favorite of the authorities. Were they in love, engaged or otherwise suited to each other. What was her demeanor? The principles of the rule of law and respectability are modified and defined by many behavioral particulars, in actuality.
One is reminded of the grim parallel of all of those persons who could not see reason for punishing the Nazis, because, after all, there was no international law against genocide!!
Bryn Mawr, so presumptuous and precious a college, thought its internal rules of behavior might be altogether sufficient. So now it must not contend that the cited conduct was, after all, covered by rules of the larger society and there was nothing irregular in appealing to the greater society's rule of action.
Still, even if it did, the issue would be moot: is there to be and is there any considerable penalty for a boy and girl having sexual intercourse: that is a rule of the whole community; and rather is not this matter regulated by a host of sub-groups and settings of society -- with a wide confusion of interests and penalties? So the large society in a sense does, under American conditions, delegate such matters to group rule and Bryn Mawr must set the rule if anyone is to set it. How typical, though, for the keen bureaucratic organizational types of modern America to use this line of reasoning -- no explicit rule - no offense -- on its members. And then to be trapped by its pretenses.
How to Die or Let Die
A list of procedures to be followed by those who attend me in the circumstances of the seeming imminence of my demise.
1.
2.
A society is not ready to move forward until a sizeable group of persons learns that both sides of the present are wrong. The shifting of people from one side of the present to the other only defeats the future. That is why I can be sure that if my ideas hurt the Democrats but please the Republicans, I am only playing the usual game of politics. When my ideas are unpleasant to both, they may shut me out, but I have what I came to get. And if there are some others like me, the future has begun.
* * * * *
Science is composed on the one hand of personalities and on the other of method and product. Neither can, of course, be distinct from the other save in discussion. yet there is an ultimate contradiction between the two. Personality requires recognition and gives initiative and hypothesis. It leads but asks respect for that. The method and product of science are impersonal. They aim at milking off every drop of the known human, even though they are profoundly human themselves. The history of a method and finding is relegated to a special branch with a narrow mission in the future. So priorities of research and discovery become irrelevant, perhaps as they always have been, but now the scientists must be forced to admit so by the overwhelming rushes of knowledge and the advent of systematic information storage and retrieval systems. Will they grant the case? Or will they retire? How long will they play the game that fame, credits, and precedence, are rationally compatible with the logic of science?
When one creates his own time and deeds, he loses the crowd's sense of impending event. The holiday comes unexpectedly and he is forced to see that everyone else has been looking forward to an event that has now arrived. He has lost the slow prolonged thrill of the weeks and days beforehand, which runs through the routinized mass.
* * * * *
November 1964
Paradox
Small organization needs to take larger risks, therefore needs prediction most.
Prediction costs much money therefore small organization cannot use science..
Large organization takes low risks a) because already has outlets
b) because bureaucracy
therefore needs prediction least but can afford prediction.
Ergo: Built-in Systemic incapacity in competence
November 1964 (or first half of 1965)
The Social Losses in Achieving Racial Equality
Preface by saying white racists (and no reason for including black racists who are of another stripe. If I were Negro, I should probably be a black racist) are traitors to the social order. One can only hope that they will not gain any advantage from what is said here, but in fact, that the gains for [liberties] said are for greater than any such possible harm.
The thesis: 1) Several negative consequences arising out of the movement for Negro rights.
The secondary thesis: 2) Stupidity and unimaginativeness of pro-rights proper and pol[itical] is causing much of the harm
November 1964 (or first half of 1965)
Should the adviser to a bad man give him bad advice.
\ Luther Evans
Harwood Childs
Huey Long
Story
HL asked HC (who had just seen Hitler) "How does he operate?" with light in his eyes.
HC gave an evasive answer, which was clever.
Should one give him even bad advice?
November 1964 (or first half of 1965)
1) Sphere of influence
No communist government and no other dealing
Ultimatum: Chinese
2) Withdrawal from Viet Nam or extension of war throughout borders of Chinese Empire. (VietNamese war can only be won if Chinese close their borders.)
3) Cessation of aid programs everywhere
4) Increase in military preparedness
5) Strengthening of alliances with Germany, Japan, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Canada (What can be done about England)
6) Movement of UN to Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
7) Generally, domestically, a think and trim government.
(1964 book)
_________________
Poem: on not revisiting one's place of birth. Hill Street torn down.
* * * * *
Poem:; Sonnet to Professor Leavis
* * * * *
Unsolved problems of the welfare state:
1. How many people are dropped through the interstices of a pluralistic society and therefore look to government as their only group?
2. How many are dissatisfied with their present groups.
3. Are non-governmental groups in fact more compulsive than the government?
4. What significant interests of society are not covered by existing and potential groups?
5. Is the political hold of a government agency as contractor tighter and more dangerous over its constituents and the country than the hold of a government office directly over its (constituents) clientele? Perhaps not, in which event government either has to run programs directly or get out entirely.
* * * * *
The President should run for one term only, of 6 years.
* * * * *
On the Death of the President in a Well-Governed Society (all the failures of government as reflected in the recent death of president Kennedy)
1. The description of what is done in Utopia (a fictionalized dramatic version)
2. How it contrasts with what was done here
3. What was avoidable, what was pardonable
4. Why the ideal system devices..(?)
5. Changes, possible and impossible.
* * * * *
Novels: Father to the Man Vol. I
Education Vol. II
War Vol. III
Peace Vol. IV
Love and Essence Vol. V
* * * * *
