It seems a long time now since the first “Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life,” in which Mortimer Adler lashed out at the “positivistic” professors as being more dangerous than Hitler, and Sidney Hook hit Mr. Adler over the head with the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the rules of scientific evidence.

As a matter of fact, 1940 was a long time ago. Ten of these conferences have now passed over the bridge of professorial “positivism” without—in the eyes of its builders at least—either damaging its structure or finding it shaken by the political and philosophical storms which have assailed it during the most ambiguous decade of this century. But oh—the landscape and seascape around this bridge! The “positivist” bridge is still intact, no doubt, but where, exactly, is it? On the allegorical map, should we place it somewhere between everything of value in our past cultural heritage and the secular city of love of the future? Or is it simply a bridge from the atom bomb “know-how” world of the moment to fascism, or to an Orwellian totalitarianism, or to some dreadful bog of unresolved tensions that will endure for centuries? Can “positivism,” or “pragmatism,” or “scientism,” or whatever we wish to call it, lead us to a solution of our present international crisis and still keep us free of the “garrison-prison state”?

The pragmatic thinkers themselves—witness most of the participants in the tenth conference, whose papers and comments are now available in the volume Perspectives on a Troubled Decade¹ (they had been asked to reconsider their positions in the light of ten years’ experience)—have not surrendered their view that liberal democracy, and perhaps democratic socialism, are science-centered and therefore non-totalitarian. They still believe in a manner of thinking that is “open” to all possibilities. They still conceive of their way as a bridge that transports will safely beyond fatality. The sense of bleakness, they seem to feel, and the sense of lost perspectives that dominate so much of our literature had better be attributed to historical processes than to our strategies for understanding history; to human nature than to the science of psychology; to the character of the atom than to physics. If we must be pessimists, they allow, we might as well be radical ones, in terms of things as they are instead of intellectual fashions; but we must not be pessimists, they insist further, we must never deny possibility its right to the last word.

_____________

Is it not a shock, “after everything”—after the enormous possibilities (to use the same word in its negative aspect) of human depravity opened up by recent history, after the mass souring of “certain certainties,” after the consequent acceleration of the intellectual swing back toward religiosity and the vast ennui concerning social morality that has begun to color our thought—to find the great majority of these more than one hundred and fifty thinkers still holding fast to their beliefs? In spite of the evidence that humanity prefers the ritual blood-bath to the more intellectual ceremony of the exchange of ideas as a method of working out its problems, the spirit of “positivism” remains eudaemonic and melioristic.

It is noteworthy that this spirit is shared by the religious thinkers of the symposium too. There are, naturally, exceptions and divergent emphases, each important enough. But the main effort seems to be a redefinition of religious concepts toward an inclusion of the secular values stressed by “positivism.” This is the direction of the comments by Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, Swami Nikilananda, and Amos N. Wilder, although their positions are not identical and it would be unwise to oversimplify them. Perhaps the attempt by the “materialist” Professor Roy W. Sellars to show the common ground of his philosophy and of Thomism is the most significant and striking indication. The meliorist spirit and the idea of good will among faiths and philosophies are in the American liberal-religious tradition, of course, as are, for instance, the stress on agape and personalism of Nels S. Ferré or the formulation of an aesthetic-romantic concept of “religious imagination” by Richard Kroner to get around the secondary role of religious metaphysics in modern thought.

Quincy Wright describes for us the conditions in which the spirit of “scientism” can best operate:

“ . . . A culture capable of becoming universal under present conditions should be ambiguous in ultimate standards, precise in immediate procedures, scientific in methods, and tolerant of . . . diverse opinions and standards . . . . Such a culture implies concern for humanity rather than for particular groups, concern for freedom rather than for conformity, reliance upon observation rather than upon intuition, and acceptance of relativity rather than dogma.”

_____________

But how can we win to such conditions? The answers proposed rely, mainly, on what sometimes seems an incredibly naive faith in time itself and the “long-run view,” in techniques of communication, and in an almost mystic analogy with the processes whereby subhuman nature reaches states of equilibrium. There is also a heavy reliance on the basic assumptions of modern child psychology, such as that a child needs affection and security and that he should be exposed, during his growth, to new methods of perceiving his situation. Thus, Gardner Murphy overleaps enormous chasms of fact in first listing these assumptions and then proposing long-range studies in political behavior; perhaps, he writes, if we study the Russians we can predict their responses and induce them “to desire understanding with us.” Others cultivate their own gardens in other ways, usually counting, like Murphy, on the benevolent paternalism of Daddy Time. Karl W. Deutsch presents a theory of “communications engineering,” contrasting it with the power engineering which has enormous possibilities for the propagandist and social-conditioner but will bring us no nearer (to understate a shudder) to the essential need for contact between man and man. Henry Margenau, the scientist, suggests a postulational methodology in ethics in the spirit of scientific relativism, and Paul Weiss contributes a metaphysical defense of freedom as a universal principle that would seem to allow for the development—in due time—of such an ethics.

_____________

Now the trouble seems to lie precisely in this area of time. If cracked records have once more set the nations dancing their old compulsive dance of war, who will turn the mechanism off so that human voices can again be heard—a posse of communications engineers? Evil pounds at all doors everywhere, hard to wish away or talk away even at the best-willed conference. Harold Lasswell’s “Perpetual Crisis and the Garrison-Prison State” puts the issue clearly enough to his colleagues, and no one—despite the occasional tendency to ignore the tangible existence of evil—denies his premises. Another talks of “the collapse of Occidental civilization”; it is almost taken for granted—is that not a strange assumption at a congress of meliorists? George E. Rohrlich’s “Transformation of Culture: A Postscript from Japan” makes it all too clear that the kind of self-reorientation a society must undergo for its moral and emotional “set” to show significant change cannot take place in any very short period of time. And, as Margaret Mead so poignantly tells us, there is no time after all:

“ . . . The state of the world today is . . . that social change has been augmented to a revolutionary rate, at the same time that the need for solutions has been enormously enhanced by the shortened time perspective which has followed the discovery of the atom bomb. However much we as scientists deplore changes which are so rapid that there is no possibility of their slow deep absorption during the quiet growth of generations who may live within them, the need for rapid changes is now inevitably upon us . . . . There is no time at all; the beginning of a solution, the sure sense that a solution can be found, is necessary now, at once.”

_____________

The “complexity” of our current problems, as Margaret Mead describes it, might perhaps better be termed “dilemma”: how to maintain a cultural relativism and at the same time find “ultimate” values; or how, as we come to master more and more fully the principles of behavior, to encourage it nevertheless to remain free and unregimented; or how to reinforce society’s will to move forward toward ideals, standards, values, even while we learn more about the relativity of ideals, standards, values. Will time “solve” such problems, or will it simply sweep them away with a bloody broom?

The present reviewer shares with these pragmatic thinkers the conviction that we must live as if we shall survive and flourish, for otherwise survival would in any event be meaningless. (“It is upon us to begin the work; it is not upon us to complete it.”) He agrees with the premise, so often emphasized by Dewey and others, that the methods of naturalistic thought provide our only usable clues to meaning; and he feels, further, that science, like—perhaps better than—religion, can help us prepare our imaginations for the survival of any particular catastrophe. And yet, if one does not feel keenly the limitations of pragmatic perspectives today—their timelag, their inability to devise ways by which cultural systems can “communicate,” their ignoring of the violent force of interests and ideological commitment whether economic, religious, or cultural—one must indeed be blind to the life all around oneself.

It is not so easy a matter as many of these conference participants seem to think to decide whether the present dilemma is but of the moment, to be forgotten tomorrow as new formulations and discoveries become available (if only we have a little more time!): or whether it derives from a deeper inner failure—either an unremarked weakness in the whole naturalistic method or its present practice, or an unacknowledged fear of breaking away from the harbor of scientific achievements to new or forgotten values that might perhaps (but there is no guarantee) give more point if less security to the “freedom of philosophy.”

_____________

¹ Perspectives on a Troubled Decade: Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1939-1949, edited by Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein and R. M. Maclver (Harper, 901 pp., $5.50).