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VII

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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Next: VIII Up: POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE Previous: VI   Contents
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