The Illusion of the Progressive Unfolding of Reality. Every month sees an extension of astronomy into the stars - we speak of quasars now. We are shown ever smaller events too. On all sides the senses triumph. If we land on the moon, how can any one doubt that the moon exists? If insects are imbedded in primeval hardened muck, who can dispute the great age of things? And did you know that there are hundreds of sub-atomic particles, and that there is something called antimatter? We can go on forever like this - extending the Boundaries of Science! Why do you dawdle?
But suppose we say:
N. The agreement says:: "We perceive, We avoid, We seek" but not "It is." "It is" is the rest of the immense whale, the cloud, the feather. We agree that to crawl another inch, we have to take reality to be such and such. We cannot, we are not allowed to, take reality as such.
Man is stronger than a rock. He has more flexible ways of facing Reality. He is weaker than a rock, for he can be more easily destroyed sometimes.
Reality and how to control it? No. We are duplicating ourselves and exchanging bird signals as we move along. What we make, we make of ourselves. We have reached the ends of the Earth and defined its shape. Is that not a triumph of the science of Reality? It is a triumph of a theory - a theory that is one of the few that man can live by - it corresponds to his basic structure. Other theories are true under less "universal" conditions of eating, moving about, and communicating. Being so they are considered "less true" theories. But the theory that "all truth is in a lover's eyes", that "nothing exists save myself," that "God rules the world with a firm, benign hand" are true to reality as well. Probably today and probably always and forever, most people will prefer the Reality theory of reality. It gets a greater accord. It provides bread and butter.
[Upside down on the page]
Essays on Life in America
How to choose a college
How to tell one class from another
How to handle race relations problems
What to read
What to say at cocktail parties
How to be religious.
The Council of State Governments, i. e. Crihfield, sent me several copies of the Spring issue of State Government bearing an article by me denouncing the logic of the Supreme Court on apportionment and decrying the futility of the Dirksen Amendment. The article is first-rate, I feel.
Last night I read Horace Cayton's Autobiography, The Long Road, for nearly 2 hours before going to sleep. His name was often on the lips of some of my friends around the University of Chicago. He worked, first of all, as Harold Gosnell's research assistant several years before I held the same position. Then he was close to St. Clair Drake, who was Elizabeth John's lover, and Elizabeth was my friend. There was the sociology department's young set in the thirties who spoke of him -- not definitely, not precisely, still as a kind of boulevardier, a white-collared man, a force to contend with. I could never fathom whether he was an intellectual or just an educated man who worked on practical problems of sociological slant.
The book is good. It gets better as it moves into its tragic last chapters of drunkenness, unemployment, and loneliness. Then at times Cayton becomes eloquent and even moving. But what a didactic, prissy strain the Negro who writes must carry -- try as he will to dissolve it. My grandmother in whose veins was aristocratic southern blood or words to that effect. His mother the tyrant -- so much of what Negroes and their analysts ascribe to the effects (the 'scars', 'bruises,''trauma', etc.) of race prejudice are the effects of a mother (in Cayton's case a nasty, sweet, handsome, upper class bitch as straitlaced as only a Negro can be) or a father or brother, or social problems like everyone else has. This is a cheap analysis, but better than the one Cayton paid Dr. McLean years of his life for.
I think of old "Gozie" Gosnell, what a dry teacher, what little warmth. But he was a great and true egalitarian -- his words about Cayton (I think I did meet Cayton on one or two occasions) were as dispassionately equal as death. One reason why Gozie and I got along so well, over a great many years (with our one big quarrel) granted we saw little of each other vast stretches of times, was this shared egalitarianism -- his dispassionate, mine passionate, but both naturally sprung, not of the concocted kind.
[Upside down on the next page is apparently notes for a critique of the Ph D Dissertation of someone whose work A de G had to evaluate.]
Psych. Facts International Affairs -- Why not study?
Evaluation? Meaning Effectiveness
(Information (What's point of it)
Propaganda
When did you take course. Work here?
Are these evaluative studies in your Bibliography
What outsiders who know about USIA activities have you interviewed?
Besides Barrett
p. 238 No official studies of objectives
pp. 35-6, pp. 278-80: Theses of Study - weak
VOA any studies - you say ineffective? Why?
p. 63 You didn't come across in Elite and Mass search my report on subject. Did you interview Mr. Crespi?
Rambling and incoherent
A lot of useless quotations
Schramm Committee
Masses determine pol. destiny of nations
Where did you get $115 millions to Jam.
(Do you know what a Jamming station is?)
Roy Carter Sr. on Philippines study
Redo as: The Controversy over Agency Objectives among Congress, the Executive, and Leadership of the U.S.I.A.
We would bring forth more objective and productive scholars were we to promote them from childhood by their self-knowledge rather than knowledge of the external world. The person who knows himself can be taught, not the person who uses the world as a club to beat his past. Time after time, I see people whose credentials seem good but whose prospects for further illumination are poor; they cannot be sociologists, political scientists, or philosophers at any rate; perhaps they might be highly special types of psychologists, statisticians, or even fillers of tiny niches in the other sciences.
We all have a lame view of the world, true, but there is a generic, conventional, self-sealing and free-thought-crippling defect which lacks a very name that it should have, so general is it. When this defect is present, the person should be led to a nice little empty niche to while away his intellectual existence.
Jill, on awakening at 8, said she had been up at 5 and that "It is a terrible feeling to be up that early and facing oneself." I replied that I often now awoke at that hour. "Don't you feel that way?" "I always do." "What is it?" "It's not being able to avoid your stream of life flowing remorselessly towards you." "When I got up for my babies, I didn't feel that way." "Of course, you didn't. That it is the contradiction that proves the point. A baby is your end, even in the middle of the night. You need look no further." "Yes." "In the middle of night, you can otherwise be either a nothing -- a waste of despair -- or a philosopher."
A common proof of divine power is :
"He who, from zone to zone, guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone, will lead my steps aright."
It is a rather obvious wish, read into an analogy. But Bryant's Waterfowl and we share an instinct for achieving goals via efficient means. Our more complicated goals cause many a deviation and obscurity. The waterfowl moves more directly and instructively. Thus we see in it the ideal of what we can conceive, that we might be without complexity and conflict. We read nature through ourselves.
(First Half 1965)
Habit and Machines
Machine as extension of Man's routinized procedure. Therefore Machine does what man does when man's routine determines other behavior and the behavior of others; the machine does likewise.
Thus it is that the machine determines values (or the valuing practices) of man.
e. g. Writer / Computer --- writer
Equation of the Sociology of Machine
Non-Routine RoutineMan 1 R Mach 1 -- N - RMan 2 RMan 1 RMach 1
Under R Man 2 Note new Non-Routine that becomes subject to Machine routine
= transformed into
