6. Knowledge: Unused and Misused

6 Knowledge: Unused and Misused HELMUT SCHOECK I Probably there is no way of knowing what it pays most· to know first. Laymen and many of our students, even after they have gained some familiarity with a chosen discipline, rarely realize the elements of chance and willful or unconscious bias in every field of science and scholarship which are inescapably linked to the fact that we have to conduct our work in a time seties of now and later. There is not only the possibility that a wrong choice of priority will exhaust time, funds, scarce experimental materials (for in stance, the minute quantity of a new element or compound iso lated for the first time) or the scholar's creative haul. A wrong choice of priority in research can also lead to effective blocking, for an indefinite time, of those research paths which would have yielded the desired or the most important result. This problem is essentially the same for all human efforts to widen knowledge.

When "science," i.e., an individual scholar or team of scholars, selects the less productive avenue of investigation, the results can . be disastrous. The phenomenon of fatigue in metals can remain a marginal research problem until one day airplanes of a new type start plunging to earth mysteriously.l Evidently man can do little to avert such calamities. If he knew always in advance which approach would yield most, he would 119 120 Scientism and Values have to possess, in many cases, so much knowledge already that the particular research problem might not be a problem at all. Not long ago a physicist, comparing natural and historical studies, emphasized the importance of seeing, or seeking, relevant lacunae in the realm of specific experience chosen by a given scholarly discipline. 2 The social sciences, i.e., the systematic efforts to study man in social action, might well profit from a similar emphasis.

Sometimes a proved lacuna-the nearly total absence of a trait, value complex, or expectation-in a society or culture will be more indicative of its potentialities than a dozen surveys proving the presence of certain values, attitudes, or habits. Of course, as teachers of all disciplines well know, few tasks are as· hard as teaching the students how to watch out for significant lacunae, for meaningfully empty slots in a multidimensional realm of hypo thetically possible referents. Obviously, like every other researcher and scholar, the person who "derives satisfaction" from studying man as a social being o makes subjective decisions when he chooses hypotheses, ap proaches, units, classes, places, and many other possible or neces sary limitations on what he actually will and can examine. We can survey the failures in a given society, and, curiously, social scientists show a preference for them; or we can, as Carle C. Zim merman of Harvard has done, focus on a unit such as the "suc cessful American high school family." 2a More important, however, than a mere shift of attention might be a systematic search for indicative lacunae in social reality. Of course, here the research situation is not comparable to the work of the natural scientist. In society we miss such seemingly simple situations as a substance turning out to be sterile when it should show growth of germs. There are very few, if any, "either-or," "all. or-nothing" propositions. Even a proof of what we take to be, say, genuine altruism will not rule out the presence of intense poten tial ,hatred and egotism, though some social scientists seem to pro ceed on that assumption. Nor can we count on exact complemen tariness or correspondence between polar entities or referents Knowledge: Unused and Misused 121 which we use in the social sciences. (For that reason, I am suspi cious of polar typologies, e.g., Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichoto mies. They lure us into fallacious, and yet perhaps sometimes self-fulfilling, prophecies of decline and decay.) 3 For instance, is it not a testimony to the blindness of social scientists and critics that they ignore such a significant social la cuna in America as the paid blood donor? In 1956, of all blood donated in the United States, only two percent came from people who received payment for it. Even in Germany, during the height of "social solidarity" under Hitler's war propaganda, the paid donor was the rule. In 1959 in West Germany one of the smaller political parties could urge its members to donate blood for pay to earn money for the party treasury. The bloodmobile, collecting blood on a voluntary and unpaid basis, left a group of Soviet medi cal officials, visiting New York in September, 1956, speechless. In the Soviet Union one would not dream of collecting blood on a noncommercial basis. Has anyone ever bothered to use this "social fact" for correcting the caricature of Am,erican society that the world has received, and still gets, from official social science? 4 II There are quite a number of foci of research and general scholarly concern that, in my judgment, omit crucial aspects. For instance, I am not encouraged or comforted by all attacks that are currently carried on in the name of a crusade against scientism.

In current trends of criticism, a number of my friends in the world of scholarship engage in a particular vein which troubles me. It is their organized hostility toward various forms of adver tising. This hostility is in reality an old prejudice among some intel lectuals. They would be amazed to know how much of their criti cism stems from men such as Fourier, who merely dreamed of things to come in the field of "hidden persuasion." In America, I could name Joseph Wood Krutch and W. H. Whyte, Jr., among the more congenial authors, and John Gal122 Scientism and Values braith, Vance Packard, and Leopold Kohr, among the less conge nial, as critics whose worst fear of "scientism" is focus,ed on its use in the economic market. It is perhaps quite interesting to observe how criticisms of ad vertising-which have been commonplace in America and Eng land during the past two decades-are now being reformulated in some West German philosophical quarters as ideas, which no one since Fourier and Karl Marx knew how to express.

The gist of these criticisms can be given in a few words. Man they say-is caught in a vicious circle. He is the slave of a system which must use any and all methods of hidden persuasion to sell him things under false pretenses, things which he does not need and which are often worth much less than claimed. Man loses his humanity (HSelbstentfremdung des Menschen" according to Marx) because of his fixation on acquiring things for consumption, a fixation imposed upon him by others. Sometimes the critics assert that this advertising apparatus of mass persuasion is especially dangerous because it lends itself to misuse by seekers after political tyranny. This last assertion is not intrinsically related to the other criti cisms of advertising. But even this assertion does not stand up. For after all, hidden mass persuasion could also be used by persons wanting to get rid of an obnoxious government. See, for example, the subtle slights on the planned economy in Great Britain by a little Mr. Sugar whose image, I believe, appeared on all sugar products.

As long as there is some freedom of communications-of the press, of advertising, of broadcasting-the same methods can be used by all antagonists. As long as we believe that one party or group may have a better case than another, there is no reason why the case for a free society should not be advanced for some voters by methods that do not require intellectual virtuosity for compre hension. Politics could be separated from the methods of hidden persua sion only if our modern mass democracies could bring themselves to reintroduce a highly unpopular limitation: a restricted suffrage. So long as we adhere to the theory that all human beings ought Knowledge: Unused and Misused 123 to take part in the political process, even those who are eighteen or twenty-one years of age, and regardless of signs of sane judg ment, no politician will ever be able to refrain from using methods of hidden persuasion. And so long as we believe that some politi cians will protect the interests of a free society better than other politicians (even though most of these may not protect it fully to our own liking), it is hardly good judgment to argue for the abo lition of such methods. of persuasion. As we have come to see in our times, the political party which we think represents the lesser evil will abide by the ban on hidden persuasion, whereas the po litical party which we most fear will not abide by the ban.

I should like to examine the case against advertising, against "hidden persuasion," put forward on grounds of human dignity and freedom of choice. To clear the decks, let me first dispose of the false notion that the use of hidden persuasion, of "all-out" advertising, is more or less restricted to a capitalist economy. The facts are to the con trary. If the state industries in the Soviet Union happen to mis judge consumer wants and needs, and turn out too many ill-con structed, poorly working TV sets at a time when people prefer Hi-Fi sets, we now have evidence that the Minister of Economics will use hidden persuasion to make Russians buy poor TV sets instead of good gramophones. (See Foreign AfJairs~ July, 1960, p. 629.) As far as the question of free and wise choice is concerned, I fail to see any special problem or villainy in the consumer goods in dustries when they are compared with other fields. of activity. So long as we want men to be free to marry the wrong girl at the wrong time, we can hardly advocate a curb on the advertising of baby carriages and washing machines. No misjudgment in the pur chase of durable goods can be as much a threat to happiness as misjudgment in selecting a mate. Women are much more perma nent than motor cars, as many alimony-payers no doubt are well aware!

The other argument against our present economic system (often made by people who wish it well in general) is this: We are de prived of some intrinsic human values when we are conditioned to take a fleeting attitude toward our material possessions. We 124 Scientism and Values know that We shall buy another car, household appliance, suit, etc., before long. Leopold Kohr goes so far in his book, The Break down of Nations} published in 1958, as to attribute supreme happiness to men of former centuries who could wear a cloth for life.5 Speculation on what makes human beings happy probably is not a proper subject for scholars. Least of all, however, do I like it from those (J. Galbraith, Leopold Kohr, and others) who once at tacked our capitalistic society when it was allegedly rigged for scarcity. I submit that interpersonal relations in a society of abundance can be much better than in a society having to make do with a few things for a lifetime. It is in precisely the latter that relations are such that human beings are slaves to things.

Some of us may remember years and decades of extreme scarcity. Replacement of lost or damaged things was virtually impossible. And most people behaved accordingly. A child who made cracks in an appliance or furniture, who broke windows, a stranger who accidentally made a cigarette-burn in another person's jacket, a maid or husband who dropped a china plate, all these became the subjects of strained and often extremely tense human relation ships. We were slaves to things because we knew they had to last indefinitely. In comparing human behavior under conditions of scarcity and abundance, it is interesting to read Hilde Thurnwald's published survey of family relations in Berlin after World War II. I recall from her observations the case of a well-bred, intelligent father who carried his CARE packages home and secretly devoured the contents in the basement. Is he a more encouraging figure of a man than the typical upper-middle-class American father of today who, with his family, indulges in a perhaps overstylized barbecue ritual in a backyard with dozens of what the antiadvertising intel lectuals call "unnecessary frills and gadgets"? 6 Relations between motorists involved in an accident, parents and children, supeTVisorsand employees, and countless other rela tions of daily life become much more tolerable, much less of a Knowledge: Unused and Misused 125 strain, much less fraught with anxiety when all those who take part are aware that no thing has to last for ever.

I contend that the industry which is geared to make last year's car obsolete is far from being the materialistic threat to a good society which it is almost invariably pictured as being by the anti advertising propagand.ists~ If we just want it to he so, and if we refuse to let the hidden persuaders of the Galbraith variety spoil our attitude toward reality, it ought to be much easier to become less materialistic and less attached to any given thing today than it was in times when most men were "stuck" for life with all the things they had to use. I believe it would not take unusual labor to find in psychiatric literature a number of cases showing mental disorder precisely on the basis of a pathological attachment to a thing which the owner believed to be irreplaceable. I have observed, in otherwise per fectly sane families, ugly scenes between normal people at the very moment when one member of the family thoughtlessly used a thing or commodity which the specific owner deemed (often irrationally) unique or extremely difficult to replace or refill.

I am equally sceptical of the Pavlov conditioning theory when it is used to promise social harmony between incompatible groups provided they "can be made to get used to each other." Man's sphere of free choice and privacy has shrunk in recent decades, partly because of the transfer of experimental findings from the level of animals to that of human beings. Social reform ers, while professing concern for the unique dignity of man when asking for individualistic legislation, often show a remarkably cyn ical and brutal concept of man when they use facts of experimental conditioning of rodents to dispel the warnings of those who think that Sumner's mores will outlast many generations of reformers to come. Several observers noted the perfectionism of the reformer as a cause of the shrinkage of personal freedom in our time. In a particular yet important case, this perfectionism resembles the quest of natural scientists for pure systems, compounds, elements, and the like. It expresses a wish to see the absolute maximum of 126 Scientism and Values a given process. Physicists try hard to produce the lowest tempera ture theoretically possible. Similarly, reformers insist on a satura tion point of contact between disparate groups. They detest any sign of what might be called rough spots between members of the human race. They promise a future without tensions-a term characteristically adopted from mechanics. This desire results in an anomaly-altruism by decree. The administration of this Uto pia proceeds by means of informal social controls, of "group dy namics," and of legislated or discretionary governmental power.

In all cases this administration is based essentially on a transfer of certain discoveries made about animals, and about human beings under very specific conditions, to human social action at large. It is based on the theory that if only we can bring together in long enough contact the members of some groups that have not previously shown great sympathy for one another, they will even tually acquire altruistic and sympathetic attitudes toward one an other. In the musical play The King and IJ this is the theme which Oscar Hammerstein put into the lyrics of the song "Getting to Know You" as a remedy for the social and political ills of our times. When Edward R. Murrow asked Mr. Hammerstein over the air why he supports so many "liberal" causes, Mr. Hammerstein cited that theme song and suggested that if we knew all about one another, as the English school teacher knew about her Siamese pupils, the age of bliss would be near.

When we review hundreds of supposedly scientific articles about "intergroup relations," they appear to add little beyond "'!\That is implied in Mr. Hammerstein's song. The concept of "mixed neigh borhoods" in city planning-a source of considerable waste and disappointment-assumes, as does the scholastically nondiscrimi nating comprehensive high school, that permanent brotherhood will emerge between people of different outlook and achievements if we can keep them in physical proximity long enough for human nature to evaporate. When the proponents of such schemes are pressed for reasonable proof of .a sound basis for their optimism, they usually cite some "psychological facts of learning" derived from experiments with Knowledge: Unused and Misused 127 rats. However, the moment we ignore these experiments and con sider the meagre responsiveness of human beings to various forms of knowledge and propaganda in nonlaboratory situations, we find little basis for such optimism.

I have probably been exposed to thousands of the most intrigu ing advertisements and broadcast commercials for various tobacco products. None has succeeded in turning me into a smoker. On the other hand, the rather overwhelming and threatening scientific correlations between smoking and serious ailments have registered remarkably little persuasion with medical men, who go on smok ing as usual. It may be one of the most arrogant errors of social science to claim and enlist legislative support for the hypothesis that men could become predominantly altruistic creatures without strong hostilities toward anyone if only they could be properly condi tioned. It is still fashionable to belittle or ignore the existence of human nature and to disregard its, stubborn and mischievous potentiali ties. On the other hand, the same people who ignore human nature are only too eager to assum,e there is a world-wide identity of human nature when they dream of a world free from conflict and with equal standards of living. Obviously, either one or the other of these views must be given up.

It would call for much longer treatment than is possible in this essay to try to analyze the fluctuations in the concept of human nature set forth by influential public figures and commentators in recommending mutually exclusive remedies for social and political problems, depending on where the sore spot happens to be located. Domestically we are asked to expect wonders from coerced con ditioning; from shows of force by wise men who, by contrast, are convinced that a show of force and strength is entirely lost on peoples of the Middle and Far East. And if there is an ethnocen tric tendency to suicidal resentments in human being (and I have observed it in many forms), then it would seem at least as unrealistic to expect lasting peace to be created by paratroopers in Ar kansas as in Algeria. 7 While studying animal~, our students of human behavior have 128 Scientism and Values completely failed to reckon with the phenomenon of cumulative resentment in human beings of a kind that is a negligible drive in animals.

Of course, I am aware of the possibility that some authors make merely political and expedient use of these inconsistencies when judging social problems. But I think, nevertheless, that indulgence in such hypocrisies is made easy for them by the failure of the contemporary anthropological disciplines to commit themselves to a firm concept of human nature. III The term "scientism'~ refers only to the fallacious use of the methods of certain natural sciences when we ought to study man as a unique being with emotional, mental, and social potentialities above those of known animals. Obviously, a critique of scientism does not imply wholesale con demnation of the adoption of the m,ethods of natural science. In deed, some of the worst culprits of scientism have merely intro duced the wrong tools and procedures of the natural sciences into the social and moral sciences. They have ignored a number of powerful intellectual and observational instruments of the bio logical sciences which we could well have used in the study of man in his social context. I am thinking here of criteria of form, of congruity v. incongruity, considerations of symmetry-in short, of morphological approaches to reality.8 Sociologists, for instance, are most reluctant to recognize persistent styles of social life, for fear of being undemocratic. And yet it is the integrating reality and indefinite life-span of such diverse styles of human life which permit almost unlimited peaceful coexistence of capsular group life.

Much of the damage which has been done to fairly well functioning systems of existing societies, in the name of social science, might have been avoided if sociologists and social psychol ogists were held, by the profession, to that minimum, observation of natural morphological criteria which we expect the anatomist to respect. One of my academic teachers, the zoologist Karl von Knowledge: Unused and Misused 129 Frisch, in his course in comparative anatomy, called the human pelvis the worst possible solution nature could have found for the birth-act. But I have yet to hear a doctor urging compulsory pubic symphysectomy for all females of our species. On the contrary, the natural childbirth fad, with its emphasis on "constructive pain,H gained favor exactly among our "progres sive" social scientists, such as Margaret Mead, who would, in social life, gladly turn society upside down in order to eliminate (largely imaginary) social pains of some members of society.9 I reject the organismic concept of society, especially when used in rhetoric for recommending public policy. No group of individ uals becomes more accessible to theoretical comprehension if un derstood as an organism. No" diseased" part of society necessarily impairs any other, although, of course, some pathological condi tion in society might spread because of contiguity. Why should we expect much good to come from telling members of a society that they owe each other a great deal because they are all part of an organism? If this is urged, we usually iend up with a system. in which we constrain one another rather than release the individual creativity. Moreover, should we not justly resent the bureaucrat who wants to plan our welfare because he defines himself as head and us as limbs of the "good society"?

Some of the foregoing may seem red~ndant. After all, who has taken the organismic theory of society iseriously in recent years? But when we examine the speeches of. contemporary politicians, presidents, and prime ministers, it is qu!ite easy to show that their grandiose flights of thought and rhetorical promises often implic itly rest on an organismic concept of society.lO It is especially disheartening to see some intellectuals insist that it is about tim.e for them to take charge of the "organism society," because life has become too complex for the common man. l1 Much of the current attack on the political and economic system we live in (and some "really advanced" critics are "farsighted" enough to include in their condemnation East and West in order to be still right if and when the Soviet Union can satisfy all con sumer wants) stems from a peculiar kind of scientism. It is partly historicism, partly a kind of philosophic trespassing. Perhaps it 130 Scientism and Values grows in part from the organismic theory of civilization. Plat?, Rousseau, Fourier, Marx, and others are cited with their models of man and community in order to declare our present society doomed.

But is it fair, either to the present structure of our economy and to today's people or to the originators of social ideas and phi losophies in centuries past, to force them together in all. analysis of current social reality? In doing this we perpetrate a historical incongruity. It is unfair to Plato when we use his concept of a true polis to measure our sorry state of politics. At the same time we are unfair to our fellow citizens when we measure their actions and attitudes against the what-might-have-been in the time of Plato had he succeeded in saving the old Greek polis. We have no way of knowing what Plato would have thought, felt, and advised had he had even a faint glimpse of societies (or nations) with 50, 170, 200, or 650 million citizens. Nor can we estimate the stature of any contemporary man by supposing his arrival in a Greek polis of 500 B.C. Of course, there are specific existential-ethical, philosophical -situations where a man must seek his place in a field of conflict ing values. These situations can be essentially the same in ancient as well. as modern times. But this is different from' attempts to apply what we know of the ancient polis as a real ideal-type to the study of contemporary society. I am wary of the theme of the "lost community." This is a crypto-quantitative comparison which tries to match wholly incongruous societies for the purpose of learning something about the quality of human relations.

When we examine publications in the field of theoretical and applied social science, two trends seem to run parallel: There is the preference for reducing the study of man in his social interac tion to the measurement of the percentage of incidence of clumsily extracted attitudes and hypothetical responses to hypothetical situ ations.The other trend is the habit of crediting the arbitrarily de lineated collective with all those faculties and potentials which are no longer attributed to individual members of society. A good example of this tendency to throw individuals, to the mercy of Knowleage: Unused and Misused 131 "wise society" can be found in the proceedings and final resolution of the American Assembly in 1953, called together to discuss "SOM cial security in modem times." 12 But any actuarial examination of social security schemes in advanced democracies shows that these collectives have less wisdom and long-range foresight in planning the welfare of society than has the average head of a family for his dependents.

One reason for this, of course, is that the head of a family can be sure of love and support even if he has to make, in the interest of long-range goals, economic decisions which frustrate the imme M diate preferences of some members of the family. The govern ments of democracies usually believe that they cannot afford such sanity. It is "politically impossible." Possibly, as Richard LaPiere shows in his book, The Freudian Ethic (1959), the same sentiments and pseudo ethics that have ren dered impotent whatever wisdom may be available to some men in government now tend to corrupt at least certain families in America. Parents read that they ought to run the family by public opinion polls among brats. If this should become a dominant fea ture of our families, it is likely that more and more of them will become incompetent. In so far as this stems from the same source as the cancer in governmenta vulgar misunderstanding of de mocracy and equality-I see little reason for optimism when the more powerful of two incompetents, a certain type of modern government, tells a certain type of modern family that it needs the central government to protect it from its own folly. A collusion of two fools will hardly lead to a sane public policy.

In some circles of contemporary sociology it is fashionable to view society and its subdivisions as "systems." Often, however, it seems to me, not enough care is taken in regard to important onto M logical distinctions. For instance, Karl von Frisch, in his studies of the bees, conceives of their state as a highly articulate system; but we hardly assume the bees to know themselves as constituent members of a system. In other words, there are at least two differ ent possibilities when we speak of a social system. The researcher and theorist, in order to make puzzling phenomena comprehen132 Scientism and Values sible, may try to sort out specific units from a range or cluster of phenomena and call their interdependency, their functioning, a system. This does not require conscious behavior on the part of those units, or of a majority of them, as members (and in terms) of a system. The "system," its functional value, may have come about by natural selection. We might think here also, for instance, of the nervous system or certain ecological systems made up of different plants and lower organisms.

And even when we speak of "American society," for the most part we have a system before us that functions in all its complexity on a level of mutual consciousness and recognition not very much higher than the systems mentioned above. Except for a few intel lectuals perhaps, most Americans, whose daily activities over cen turies helped to create a complex and highly productive socioeco nomic system, did not, and do not now, go about their business all the time thinking of their social system. By contrast, there are social systems that are systems precisely because of a theory of a specific system that preceded them in time. They remain functioning systems only as long as most of their members remain intensely conscious of the theory that has welded them into a system. Any complex group of human beings perform ing a highly specialized service, whether it be Lloyd's of London, an opera company, or the general staff of an army, might be men tioned as illustrations. Yet again, there is a difference between the social system of Lloyd's, a modern opera hous.e, and the German General Staff. Unlike the former, which grew gradually by trial and error, the German General Staff was an articulate and func tioning social system mostly by virtue of all its members' constant and intens,e dedication to the theory which had put the system into existence.

If these different meanings of the term "social system" are con fused, naive yet ambitious legislators and policy-makers often may come to expect from "society" a continuous performance on a level of cohesion and dedication which we could expect only in the best circumstances from a system of the type illustrated by the General Staff.

Knowledge: Unused and Misused IV 133 As several papers in this. book argue, without conscious com mitment to value judgments we can hardly hope to gain a concept of the true, Le., least coercive and least fr.agile, relationship be tween man and his society. I should like to show that even our "highly scientific" natural sciences cannot do without such value judgments. (Michael Polanyi, in his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy) published both in Britain and the United States in 1958, presents the same argument in detail.) Let us examine the work of the chemist. He serves one of the oldest true natural sciences. His knowledge caused some of the most spectacular transformations. of our internal and external en vironments.Chemistry, among other deeds, helped medical art become, in part, scientific. Laymen and social scientists accept chemistry as a true representative of the exact and nonsubjective natural sciences where measurement rules and the subjectivity of human sensory experience has been replaced by apparatuses re cording in figures and decimals.

Especially, the public may believe, chemistry without exception is an exact science with demonstrable nonevaluative proof when the judgment and findings of a chemist are introduced in court and a man can be convicted on such evidence. This is a fairy tale. Recently I refreshed my merp.ory of my own studies in that field in a long talk with a young doctor of chemistry who works in a state laboratory controlling foods and beverages. Quite a number of his analyses, on the basis of which a manufacturer or innkeeper may be sentenced to jail, depend on the simple fact that chemist and judge agree on a single sensory perception which most people would call a culture-bound value judgment. A stench is a loath some stench in certain cultures only. Yet, I was told, it may suffice for conviction even if a sample of suspect fat eludes all other methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis. However, even though chemist and judge agree on a stench as the criterion of unfitness for human consumption, the same intrinsic sensory ex134 Scientism and Values perience might make the same sample of food a delicacy in another culture.

The most recent reference books in the field of food chemistry abound in value judgments when stating criteria for finding butter or meat unfit for human consumption. Delicate and highly subjec tive syndromes of color, odor, and texture, of just plain "looks," guide the chemist when he has to pass his scientific, expert judg ment on butter. Often it is not a question of poisonousness at all, but simply a question of aesthetics. 13 Psychologists of language know that the olfactory sense of hu mans permits distinctions for which no general verbal referents exist. When chemists communicate about a certain analytical fact, they rely on reasonable identity of subjective experiences which are completely absent for some members of the human race. 14 When the chemist applies his science and expertness to the judg ment of food samples in criminal cases, for instance, he is per mitted the use of words such as "loathsome," "sickening," "repul sive," and judge and jury are likely to agree. But if· a sociologist should be caught by his profession, calling polygamy, communism, or the system of the Soviet Union "loathsome," he is immediately attacked as "unscientific" ~r "unscholarly." (The censure is less likely to follow should he label capitalism or profit-seeking a loathsome business!) And yet the weight the chemist's expertness gathers in court is due .to the fact that what he refuses to eat a layman also refuses to consume. This is not made invalid by the fact that we can always find some people who would love, or could be "brainwashed" to consume, that particular sample of food.

Therefore, what is so "unscientific" about a political scientist or economist who calls a planned or an egalitarian economy a "loath some" affair? Surely he can find plenty of common folk who would know what he means· as precisely as does the public which agrees with the food chemist. A man whose sense of color is impaired could hardly work as chemist or physician. Only recently have methods and apparatuses become available which substitute for the human faculty of recog nizing a change in color.

Knowledge: Unused and Misused 135 And yet studies of individual variations show that human beings vary considerably in their faculty of identifying specific stimuli for the senses. What the chemist or physician relies upon is average, a reasonable, and sometimes probably culture-bound ability of ordinary people to find identical verbal referents. or memory images ("smells like ..."). However, it is very doubtful whether today's political science or sociology would permit me to size up the future actions of a Castro or Nasser on the basis of comparing my impression of his performance in a television interview with my memory images of a Hitler. I may do this, perhaps, as an essayist or journalist, but not as an observer who claims scholarly or scientific authenticity. And yet I believe I can show that the essential complexity of the syndrom,es perceived is not greater in the last case than in the case of a chemist or medical pathologist who testifies .about his find ings in court. Is it not strange that iln audience of ordinary people, when shown successively a movie of Hitler and one of Nasser or Fidel Castro, each addressing a crowd, would instantly, without even understanding German, Arabic, or Spanish, recognize some intrinsically common fe.atures; whereas, I am, afraid, a professional group of political scientists might squeamishly refuse to commit themselves to any cognition from which inferences for policy deci sions could be drawn?

It seems we know much more about men and their likely actions and potentials than the behavioral and "policy sciences" permit us to know and say officially. We may lack "scientific" methods, espe cially quantitative ones-as does the analytical chemist-for assess ing and recording the rottenness of a form of leadership, but there is no reason why we could not reaffirm the freedom, of qualitative judgment when studying, let us say, a labor union monopoly or junta. What we students of man and his organization need more than new fancy methods and methodologies is a general recognition that sometimes our judgments may be as old-fashioned as those of a modern food chemist. We must recapture the scholarly legitimacy of ordinary observation when deciding between better and worse, 136 Scientism and Values between more or less functional, more or less apt to cause friction. This could bridge the gap between a lost discipline-moral phi losophy-and comparative political science, sociology, and eco nomics.

In saying this, I do not ignore the element of human freedom and its role in our specific subject matter, human action. True, there is the (remote) possibility that a labor union hierarchy, after being called rotten to the core, might pick itself up and become a bevy of altruistic stewards of power. Obviously, rancid butter will never respond to the verdict of a chemist. We touch here a most vexing problem. It has been discussed under such titles as "private versus public prediction" or "self fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies." Robert K. Merton, K. R. Popper, and others have dealt with it. Value judgments as well as seemingly neutral bodies of data in the social sciences have conse quences within their subject matter, men and groups of men. Again we have to guard ,against an overstatement of this fact. It is not an exclusive faculty of human beings. Lower forms of life also may evade-as if rational-the application of human intellec tual concepts. Certain stocks of germs are known to outwit the antibiotics researcher by selectively outbreeding his luck with re sistant strains. In other words, it may be as difficult for man to freeze advantageously his relationship to his nonhuman environ ment as it is toward his fellow men. We seem as capable of over reaching our supply of natural resources (experimenting in the name of material progress) as we are capable of overextending our resources of altruism, good will, and patience (experimenting in the name of social progress). A biologist enthralled by the beauty of a theory can destroy an ecological equilibrium in nature as surely as can a sociologist or economist in society.

Almost every time a finding or a hypothesis is. made public by a student of human action, it leads to an artifact. In this regard there is little difference in effectiveness (dangerousness) between the various methods. A bluntly evaluative term can cause as vio lent a response as the dry publication of a set of telling figures. Consequently, limiting ourselves to quantitative behavioral sciKnowledge: Unused and Misused 137 ence, seemingly free from value judgments, will not prevent the occurrence of unexpected or unwanted reactions in the groups and societies we are studying. As social scientists, as students of social interaction, we are in escapably responsible for a stream of artifacts unless we remain forever silent about what we believe we know. We cannot prevent the intrusion of novel facts and data-providing processes into the field of study as .a result of our work. We share this problem with the natural scientists, but sometimes we suffer more from its con sequences.

What troubles me, however, is the failure of so many social scientists to concern themselves with their artifacts as systemati cally and conscientiously as the microscopic anatomists did when they wondered whether their dyes had caught structures in nerve cells or merely made cracks in a formerly unstructured whole. Too many social scientists seem unequipped to tell cracks from struc tures, especially when they produce the former. The pathologist or the haematologist, in reaching a crucial dif ferential diagnosis, may rely on criteria of form, color, texture, contiguity, and configuration which defy verbal, let alone quanti tative, objectification. The same is true of the engineer, the archi tect, the physicist, and the mathematician. I!> These scientists and scholars may declare a certain solution to a problem less elegant, less desirable, than another without being obliged to offer any other reasons save their cultivated sense of form and coherence.

But woe to the sociologist, economist, or political scientist who can cite no statistical figments to buttress his preference for one type of organization over another. Is it really so significant whether or not a socialist economy could solve the problem of allocation and dis tribution in some fashion as long as enough sane men agree that the market mechanism is a more elegant and aesthetically pleasing method for these tasks? Do we need quantifying policy sciences to find (or doubt) that political succession by election or hereditary monarchy is more elegant and aesthetically pleasant than one by murder? Ironically, natural scientists possess the privilege of falling back 138 Scientism and Values on intrinsic human experiences as ultimate and .axiomatic proof and reason for preferences-whereas the students of man are no longer allowed to argue on the basis of their introspective knowl edge of what fits man best.

v It shows the present-day delusions of behavioral scientists that they scoff at methods and criteria of cognition which still belong to the standard arsenal of chemistry. Sub rosa) of course, we know that all we have for telling a differ ence in our social environment are our traditional terms of refer ence, no matter how far out of line they are with the "progress" of social science. For instance, what is the test for the degree of deterioration of a city section? The New York Times can hardly be accused of unfairness to nonwhite racial minorities. Yet, in a long and learned survey of the disturbing decline of "urban quality" in the city blocks sur rounding Columbia University, the writer for the Times) with apologies, admitted that the only genuine criterion for the worsen ing of an urban area is the influx of Negroes and Puerto Ricans. He wrote: ~his is an unpopular criterion, but it is the best yard stick of urban decline.

And the University of Chicago, desperately trying to get rid of slums around its campus, helped build a belt of luxury apartment houses with rents assuring a white neighborhood, a sin against the times for which this bastion of racial egalitarianism was attacked in the press.16 In brief, no matter how social scientists may measure "progress" in "social" or "democratic" attitudes, when it comes to city plan ning as a means of saving cultural centers from going under in a sea of slums, "liberals" and conservatives often employ the same traditional criteria for what is good and what is worse. I have tried to show the scholarly legitimacy of s:ubjective (de pending on impressions of a sensory and cultural quality) value judgments in the study of social man. But it is not enough if, for instance, I can show the scholarly Knowledge: Unused-and Misused 139 respectability and epistemological legitimacy of a statement such as "communism smells." Harold J. Laski, in his last book, criti cized Sir Winston Churchill who, by rallying the Atlantic commu nity of nations, committed a crime against history when he saved central and western Europe from Moscow, thus, as Laski put it, perpetuating the bad odor of decaying capitalistic society.l" Whose sense of smell shall prevail? I think egalitarianism smells. Many others say every sign of social stratification emits an odor of rotten social fabrics.

Of course, there are some tests, inductive at best, which should support one kind of value judgment against another. For instance, we could examine the net migration of man. Many more people constantly flee from state socialism to the West than from the "decaying West" into "flourishing empires" of the East. The egali tarian kibbutzim in Israel are losing members as did all such uto pias that ever existed. IS But this test would not help us in all cases of social and political analysis. Hitler Germany, for instance, succeeded in luring back into the "community" many ethnic Germans from abroad, even Austrians from Italy. I recall an Austrian-Italian waitress in a hotel by the Mediterranean in Nervi near Genoa in 1949. She spoke to us about fellow Austrian-Italians, including her brother, who fol lowed Hitler's call to "return" north ten years earlier. She was still wondering what had made them run: "All of a sudden," she said, "the blue sea was no longer blue. Why?"

Is it that some personalities can best win a sense of importance, temporarily perhaps, by following the charism of the collective, while others, for their sense of well-being, need personal freedom, even at the cost of temporary hardship and disappointment, to such .a degree that they move away from planned, paternalistic or collectivistic systems whenever they can? Perhaps it is so difficult to develop a social science congruent with human nature because we are always faced with "mixed societies," made up of both types of people, thus never allowing even an approximate congruousness of theory and actual behavior, save for short periods and specific instances. Thus, at any rate, even if Red China, for example, somehow 140 Scientism and Values could induce man.y of the overseas Chinese to flock back to the mainland, instead of the present exodus of her nationals, her fel.. low-traveling friends in the West could not use that fact as a cri terion of her goodness unless they retroactively granted the same to Hitler's Third Reich. 19 NOTES 1. The problem of priOrity in research obviously can become crucial in medical science. Errors in choice of strategy may be fatal. See, for in stance, the controversy over "Probability, Logic and Medical Diagnosis"

(a paper by R. S. Ledley and L. B. Lusted) in Science, CXXX, July 1, 1959, and October 9, 1959. 2. Henry Margenau, "Physical versus Historical Reality," Philosophy of Science, XIX (July, 1952), 203. 2a. Carle C. Zimmerman and Lucius F. Cervantes, Successful American Fam ilies (New York: Pageant Press, 1960). 3. For the concept of self-fulfilling prediction, see Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, revised edition, 1957), chap. XI, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." For a very sane critique of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy, see Richard T. LaPiere, A Theory of Social Control (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1954), chap. I. 4. Kathleen McLaughlin, "u. S. Blood-Giving Baffles Russians," New York Times, September 13, 1956. See also New York Times} April 27, 1958, p. 15, on blood donors. 5. See also Leopold Kohr, "Toward a New Measurement of Living Stand ards," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XV (October, 1955), 93-102.

6. According to a poll in October, 1959, the vast majority of Americans, and, interestingly enough, especially the upper-middle class, approve of advertising. Could it be that our professional intellectuals, as in so many other areas of life, worry themselves to pieces about a problem which is of little concern to those on whose behalf they worry? 7. Compare, for instance, the New York Times of August 3, p. 10 E, and August 17, p. 5 E, 1958, for the entirely different moral verdict on the use of force, as well as the estimate of its success, when it comes to dealing with Nasser versus dealing with a state of the United States. 8. For a meaningful use of the concept of asymmetry in sociology, see, for instance, Richard L. Meier, "Explorations in the Realm of Organization Theory," Behavioral Science, IV (July, 1959), 242. 9. See Margaret Mead's attack on the book Don't Be Afraid of Your Child by Hilde Bruch, A merican Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XXIV, 426-428, and the defense of Bruch's book by William S. Langford, ibid., 838 :£f.

10. For typical illustrations, see text of President Eise~hower's address at Knowledge: Unused and Misused 141 Abilene, New York Times, October 14, 1959, or text of American Assem bly Report, New York Times, October 19, 1959. See also American Assembly on Economic Security, Columbia University, 1954, p. 7, n. 16. II. The canard that modern society and modern "life" have become too complex and too "big" for individuals and local agencies to handle is being heard over and over again. Arthur Larson, for instance, said: "... you ask yourself if any private-enterprisefirm, any insurance com pany or combination of insurance companies, any state government or local government could administer Social Security. Of course, it couldn't. Social Security covers hundreds of millions of people [really that many?] going all over the earth." ("A Mike Wallace Interview with Arthur Larson," The Fund for the Republic, 1958, p. 10). Professor Larson, formerly a Special Assistant to President Eisenhower, forgets to explain only one thing: Why should it be necessary at all for a single agency to cover all those "hundreds of millions of people going all over the earth"?

Why not let a multitude of local and smaller agencies and insurance companies administer the voluntarily chosen insurance schemes of in dividual families? The rhetoric of "complexity" is also found in a Senate bill to "estab lish a permanent Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Rela tions," S. 2026, Congressional Record, May 21, 1959, p. 7851: "Because the complexity of modern life intensifies the need in a federal form of government ... ." The lack of empirical basis, the emptiness of the complexity-argument is brought out by D. R. Price-Williams in his review of Mental Health Aspects of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Population Studies, July, 1959, p. 126. 12. See reference 10 above, last item. 13. Much of the following information I received from Dr. Heinz Grimm, chemist and pharmacologist at the Austrian federal institute for pure foods in Vienna. For this method of applied chemistry see Kurt G.

Wagner, "Zur Theorie der Bewertungsschemata fiir Lebensmittel," Deutsche Lebensmittel-Rundschau, XLV (June, 1949), 145-149. Wagner stresses "that the exaggerated preference for numerically measurable facts" [scientism too!] among chemists led to the relative neglect of the organoleptic method with its somewhat subjective statements, although it is still in many instances the only useful method. Wagner also com plains-and here the chemist sounds almost like a nonscientistic sociolo gist-that some of his fellow chemists should have devoted as much time and mental effort to the systematization of the sensory methodology as they wasted on playing with apparatuses (p. 145), especially in view of the fact that the chemistry of nutrients cannot do without judgments of smell and taste. Wagner knows that only people with special gifts of these senses ought to work as nutritional chemists and fears errors from the less gifted.

More recently, Professor D. J. Tilgner gave a brilliant defense and survey of the sensory analysis of nutrients. His bibliography includes a number of items in English. ("Der gegenwartige Stand der quantitativen 142 Scientism and Values und qualitativen sensorischen Analyse der Qualitat von Lebensmitteln," Deutsche Lebensmittel-Rundschau, LIV [May, 1958], 99-108). I should like to cite some of them here: H. S. Groninger, Tapper! and Knapp, "Some Chemical and Organoleptic Changes in Gamma-irradiated Meats," Food Res., XXI (1956), 555-564. D. Sheppard, "The Importance of Psychophysical Errors," J. Dairy Res., XIX (1952), 348-355. E. L. Pippin, A. A. Campbell and Streeter, "Flavour Studies," J. Agric. and Food Chemistry, II (1954), 354-367. M. M. Boggs and H. L. Hanson, "Analysis of Foods by Sensory Difference Tests," Adv. Food Research, II (1949), 219-258. H. L. Hanson et al., "Sensory Test Methods," Food Techn., IX (1955), 50-59. D. R. Peryam, "Hedonic Scale Method of Measuring Food Preferences," Food Engng., XXIV (1952), 7. E. C. Crocker, "The Nature of Odor," Techn. Associat. of the Pulp and Paper Industry, XXXV (1952), 9.

Tilgner emphasizes the differences in talent and gifts in sensory com petence among chemists, especially the varying gift of feeling (Gefilhls begabung) which is important when it comes to deciding qualities and degrees of appetizingness or loathsomeness. And yet, Tilgner joins the Australian chemist, D. W. Crover, ("Progress in Food Analysis." Food Manuf., XXV, 1949) in saying that the present status of the sensory (organoleptic) method permits results so precise that this method belongs to the chemical-analytical methodology. Microchanges in protein mole cules, for instance, which elude ordinary chemical analyses, can be dis covered quickly and definitely by the sensory method (p. 100). Incidentally, at this point, the method of the food chemist and the medical haematologist become similar epistemologically. Thus, in practice, the natural sciences are far from being reduced to the study of the measurable. Curiously enough, E. C. Harwood ("On 'Measurement as Scientific Method in Economics,''' American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XVII [October, 1957], 101) challenges Leland B. Yeager's claim that there are social scientists narrow enough to restrict science to measurement. At any rate, I can name one: the sociologist Franz Adler, who wants to restrict to pure measurement even so delicate a field as the sociology of knowledge. The original view that science is measurement, of course, was given by Galileo, who wrote: "My program is to measure what can be measured and to make measurable what can not be measured yet." (Galilei, Opere, ed. by Alberi, IV, 171). But it is very doubtful whether Galileo ever would have thought of "making measurable" those phenomena which our scientistic students of man insist on measuring.

14. Biochemical individuality and the sense of smell is one of the problems intriguing Roger J. Williams. See his books Free and Unequal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), p. 32, and Biochemical Individuality (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1956), p. 180. 15. The issues of qualitative versus quantitative judgment and the element of subjectivity in the field of haematology are discussed, in a vein sup porting my argument, by St. Sandkiihler, "tiber Dokumentation von Knochenmarkbefunden," Rontgen-und Labor-Praxis, X, 278-280. Or, Knowledge: Unused and Misused 143 take another area of medical diagnosis, the perception of macroscopic syndromes, e.g., the first diagnosis of coronary occlusion as reported in R. H. Major, Classic Descriptions of Disease (2nd ed.; Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1939), pp. 464 If. Similar problems of subjectively differentiating diagnosis face the archeologist: "Modern archeology has reached a point where many possible patterns and hypotheses can be suggested, each of which seems to propose cultural 'facts' that are not necessarily mutually exclusive and that do not necessarily contradict each other but which in the same body of materials reflect various aspects of a many-sided reality .... In the case of cultural pattern or configuration, however, the 'reality' of proposed fact is less apparent because the particular interests of the investigator, and perhaps the historical development of the science, intrude more strongly into the result." (Joseph R. Caldwell, "The New American Archeology," Science, CXXIX [February 6, 1959], 305.) For the problem of elegance in research and theory, see, for instance, John D. Tsilikis, "Simplicity and Elegance in Theoretical Physics,"

American Scientist, XLVII (Spring, 1959), 87-96. 16. "Renewal Project Divides Chicago," New York Times, September 28, 1958, and Sol Tax, "Residential Integration: A Chicago Case," Human Organization, XVIII (Spring, 1959). 17. H. J. Laski, The Dilemma of Our Times (London, 1952), pp. 46 f. 18. Seth S. King, New York Times, February 20, 1958; see also Amitai Etzioni, "The Functional Differentiation of Elites in the Kibbutz," American Journal of Sociology, LXIV (March, 1959), 476-487. 19. Ironically, and pertinent to this point, Walter Lippmann, in the early spring of 1960, used migration figures from West Germany to East Ger· many cited by the Communists as evidence that all could not be so bad in East Germany as to warrant a strong stand on the part of the West in regard to the Berlin question. And yet, a few weeks later a flood of refugees, unprecedented in recent years, began to reach West Berlin and has not yet subsided at the time of this writing.