3: Stick to your discipline. Specialization has become as absurdly extreme in the educational world as in the medical world. One no longer is a specialist in American Government, but in Congress, or the Presidency, or Pressure Groups: a historian is a “colonialist” or an “early national period” man. This is natural when education is divorced from the promotion of values. To work on a real problem (like how to eliminate poverty in a nation producing eight hundred billion dollars’ worth of wealth each year), one would have to follow that problem across many disciplinary lines without qualm, dealing with historical materials, economic theories, political obstacles. Specialization ensures that one cannot follow a problem through from start to finish. It ensures the functioning in the academy of the system’s dictum: divide and rule.
Another kind of scholarly segregation serves to keep those in the university from dealing with urgent social problems: that which divorces fact from theory. We learn the ideas of the great philosophers and poets in one part of our educational experience. In the other part, we prepare to take our place in the real occupational world. In political science, for instance, a political theorist discusses transcendental visions of the good society; someone else presents factual descriptions of present governments. But no one deals with both the is and the ought; if they did they would have to deal with how to get from here to there, from the present reality to the poetic vision. Note how little work is done in political science on the tactics of social change. Both student and teacher deal with theory and reality in separate courses; the compartmen-talization safely neutralizes them.
Rule 4. To be “scientific” requires neutrality. This is a misconception of how science works, both in fact, and in purpose. Scientists do have values, but they decided on these so long ago that we have forgotten it; they aim to save human life, to extend human control over the environment for the happiness of men and women. This is the tacit assumption behind scientific work, and a physiologist would be astonished if someone suggested that he starts from a neutral position as regards life or death, health or sickness. Somehow the social scientists have not yet gotten around to accepting openly that their aim is to keep people alive, to equitably distribute the resources of the earth, to widen the areas of human freedom, and therefore to direct their efforts toward these ends.
The claim that social science is “different” because its instruments are tainted with subjectivity ignores discoveries in the hard sciences: that the very fact of observation distorts the measurement of the physicist, and what he sees depends on his position in space. The physical sciences do not talk about certainty any more, but rather about “probability”; and while the probabilities may be higher for them than in the social sciences, both fields are dealing with elusive data.
Rule 5. A scholar must, in order to be “rational,” avoid “emotionalism.” True, emotion can distort. But it can also enhance. If one of the functions of the scholar is accurate description, then it is impossible to describe a war both unemotionally and accurately at the same time. And if the special competence of the mind is in enabling us to perceive what is outside our own limited experience, that competence is furthered, that perception sharpened, by emotion. A large dose of “emotionalism” in the description of slavery would merely begin to convey accurately to a white college student what slavery was like for the black man.
Thus, exactly from the standpoint of what intellect is supposed to do for us—extend the boundaries of our understanding—the “cool, rational, unemotional” approach fails. For too long, white Americans were emotionally separated from what the Negro suffered in this country by cold, and therefore inadequate, historical description. War and violence, divested of their brutality by the prosaic quality of the printed page, became tolerable to the young. (True, the poem and the novel were read in the English classes; but these were neatly separated from the history and government classes.) Reason, to be accurate, must be supplemented by emotion, as Reinhold Niebuhr once reminded us.
Refusing, then, to let ourselves be bound by traditional notions of disinterestedness, objectivity, scientific procedure, rationality—what kinds of work can scholars do, in deliberate unneutral pursuit of a more livable world? Am I urging Orwellian control of scholarly activities? Not at all. I am, rather suggesting that scholars, on their own, reconsider the rules by which they have worked, and begin to turn their intellectual energies to the urgent problems of our time. The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish,” he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.
Specifically, we might use our scholarly time and energy to sharpen the perceptions of the complacent by exposing those facts that any society tends to hide about itself: the facts about wealth and poverty; about tyranny in both communist and capitalist states; about lies told by politicians, by the mass media, by the church, by popular leaders. We need to expose fallacious logic, spurious analogies, deceptive slogans, and those intoxicating symbols and concepts which drive people to murder (the flag, communism, capitalism, freedom). We need to dig beneath the abstractions so that our fellow citizens can make judgments on the particular realities beneath political rhetoric. We need to expose inconsistencies and double standards. In short, we need to become the critics of the culture rather than its apologists and perpetuators.
We who are fortunate in having the resources of knowledge are especially equipped for such a task. Although obviously not remote from the pressures of business, military needs, and politics, we have just that margin of leeway, just that tradition of truth-telling (however violated in practice) which can allow us to become spokesmen for change.
This will require holding up before society forgotten visions, lost Utopias, unfulfilled dreams—badly needed in this age of cynicism. Along with such visions, we will need specific schemes for accomplishing important purposes, which can then be laid before the groups that can use them. Let the economists work out a plan for free food, instead of advising the Federal Reserve Board on interest rates. Let the political scientists work out insurgency tactics for the poor, rather than counter-insurgency tactics for the military. Let the historians instruct us or inspire us, from the data of the past, rather than amusing us, boring us, or deceiving us. Let the scientists figure out and lay before the public plans on how to make autos safe, cities beautiful, air pure. Let all social scientists work on modes of change instead of merely describing the world that is, so that we can make the necessary revolutionary alterations with the least pain.
I am not sure what a revolution among scholars will look like, any more than I know what a revolution in the society will look like. I doubt that it will take the form of some great cataclysmic event. More likely, it will be a process, with periods of tumult and of quiet, in which we will, here and there, by ones and twos and tens, create pockets of concern inside old institutions, transforming them from within. There is no great day of reckoning to work toward. Rather, we must begin now to liberate those patches of ground on which we stand—in our classrooms, in our studies, in our writing—to “vote” for a new world (as Thoreau suggested) with our whole selves all the time, rather than in moments carefully selected by others.
Thus, we will be acting out the beliefs that always moved us as humans but rarely as scholars. To do that, we will need to defy the professional mythology which has kept us on the tracks of custom, our eyes averted (except for moments of charity) from the cruelty on all sides. We will be taking seriously for the first time the words of the great poets and philosophers whom we love to quote but not to emulate. We will be doing this, not in the interest of the rich and powerful, or in behalf of our own careers, but for those who have never had a chance to read poetry or study philosophy, who so far have had to strive alone just to stay warm in winter, to stay alive through the calls for war. Ultimately, we will be acting for ourselves and our children.
