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One of the most fascinating and disquieting symptoms of this
trend is to be found in the policy of the great philanthropic
foundations of the West. The criticism of these institutions most
frequently made by both European and American observers is
that their aims are too crudely utilitarian: that instead of seeking
to support the pursuit of truth or creative activity as such (basic
research; for example; or artistic activity) they are dedicated
to the most direct and immediate improvement of human life
conceived in crudely material terms--physical well-being,
solutions to short-term social and economic problems, the
manufacture of prophylactics against politically `undesirable' views, and
so on. But these charges seem to me misconceived. The efforts
of the celebrated and munificent bodies engaged in this type of
activity rest, I am convinced, on a genuine and disinterested
desire to serve the deepest interests of mankind; and not merely
its material needs. But these interests are all conceived almost
entirely in therapeutic terms: tensions (within or between
individuals or groups or nations) that need to be released,
wounds, conflicts, fixations, `phobias' and fears, psychical and
psycho-physical abnormalities of all sorts which require the aid of
specialized healers--doctors, economists, social workers, teams
of diagnosticians or engineers or other masters of the craft of
helping the sick and the perplexed--individual and collective
sources of practical wisdom of every kind. To the degree to which
such suffering exists and can be treated by the applied sciences--
genuine physical or mental sickness, poverty, social and economic
inequality, squalor, misery, oppression, which men and money,
experts and equipment, can cure or alleviate--such policies are,
of course, entirely beneficent and their organized support is a
great moral asset to an age and a country. But the reverse of this
coin is the tendency--difficult to avoid, but disastrous--to
assimilate all men's primary needs to those that are capable of
being met by these methods: the reduction of all questions and
aspirations to dislocations which the expert can set right. Some
believe in coercion, others in gentler methods; but the conception
of human needs in their entirety as those, of the inmates of a
prison or a reformatory or a school or a hospital, however
sincerely it may be held, is a gloomy, false, and ultimately degraded
view, resting on denial of the rational and productive nature of all,
or even the majority of, men. The resistance to it, whether in the
form of attacks on American `materialism' (when it springs from
a genuine, if naive, and often crude form of altruistic idealism) or
on communist or nationalist fanaticism (when it is, more often
than not, a misconceived, over-pragmatic search for human
emancipation), derives from an obscure realization that both
these tendencies--which spring from a common root--are hostile
to the development of men as creative and self-directing beings.
If men are indeed such beings, even this tendency, overwhelming
as it seems to be at present, will not, in the end, prove fatal to
human progress. This circular argument, which is, in essence,
that of all critical rationalists--of Marx (at any rate in his youth)
and Freud as well as Spinoza and Kant, Mill and Tocqueville--if
it is valid, offers some ground for a cautious and highly qualified
optimism about the moral and intellectual future of the human
race.
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2001-02-25