To the Editor:
There can be no question of the urgent importance of the issues Mr. Glazer raises in his article “Government by Manipulation” in the July COMMENTARY.
As to the responsibility of the social scientist, I am not entirely clear in my own mind. I certainly feel that it would be socially useful if human-relations scientists were invited to a greater extent to participate in policy decisions. Our science is so immature that it would be ridiculous to urge that we should make decisions, but I do think we should insist on the right to be heard in any organization in which we work. The more sensitive and socially conscious human-relations people are more and more refusing to take jobs where they are used only as technicians and trouble-shooters.
On the other hand, it is possible to go too far to the other extreme. Ought the career man in the State Department to deprive his country of his long training by resigning in protest against a policy that may, after all, be very temporary? Physicians, and all governments in war time, select and withhold information—i. e. they “manipulate” people. No one blames military officers who carry out orders the wisdom of which they may privately question. Is there not a danger in demanding that human-relations scientists arrogate to themselves the right to pass on the long-range consequences of policies and to withhold their technical assistance if they are convinced that a policy is “wrong”? It seems to me that, up to a point, we must accept the need for experts in the production of responses in others, living as we do in an industrial society where the proportion of white collar workers is ever mounting and where the possibility of direct access to “management” continually diminishes.
These are difficult questions. But I am entirely clear as to the following: an appreciable number of human-relations scientists, exhilarated by newly discovered skills and possibly a trifle intoxicated by the fact that for the first time men of affairs are seeking advice on a fairly extended scale, are encouraging hopes which their science is not mature enough to fulfill. To restrain human-relations scientists from irresponsible pronouncements, the profession does need to develop sanctions comparable to those which law and medicine have developed to control irresponsibility, charlatanism, and malpractice. The lesson to be drawn from applied human-relations science is that of caution, of modest expectations as to what can be accomplished, of humility as to what may be predicted with present instruments for observation and conceptualization, of preference for vix medicatrix naturae in many social situations.
This does not mean that human-relations science has not attained any practical utility. It is one thing to be able to make some useful diagnoses of the state of the social weather in a given area—and by thus foreseeing to be able to prepare for contingencies that might otherwise have been handled by even cruder improvisations. But it is quite another thing to interfere, wilfully to introduce new complications into an already tortuous social maze. More attention to individuals and less (proportionately) to over-all social planning seems advisable. One of the wise things Niebuhr says in The Nature and Destiny of Man is that the contemporary world overestimates the powers of the “collective will” and underestimates those of the individual will. At least when it comes to large canvases, the human-relations scientist would still do well to abide by what has proved a helpful rule in many medical cases: “Do nothing. Sit tight. Watch. Prepare for probable developments but do not interfere with natural forces making for recuperation until you are sure that action will be helpful, or, as an absolute minimum, do no harm.”
There are a few minor points in Mr. Glazer’s article with which I would take issue. (1) I do not entirely agree that the most important discoveries of human-relations scientists are altogether “commonsensical.” The Rorschach test is a striking example, and the results achieved with this and other “projective techniques” (which outrage “common sense”) are rather dramatic. (2) I am surprised that Mr. Glazer does not mention the use of human-relations scientists in the U. S. Indian Service. This is where they first got their chance on a large scale in the American Government. (3) The quotation from Dr. Leighton on p. 86 seems to me to distort the context. Leighton is making a scientific judgment based on observation—not necessarily approving it, but merely reporting that this seems to be a fact.
Clyde Kluckhohn
Harvard University
Department of Anthropology
