Food for Alumni Thought

For those not lucky enough to be there, this transcript of a lively panel discussion (slightly edited and shortened) provides a taste of Alumni College 1967. Panelists were the four members of the faculty: Harold L. Bond '42, Professor of English; Arthur W. Luehrmann Jr., Assistant Professor of Physics; Jacob Neusner, Associate Professor of Religion; and Larry K. Smith, Instructor in History.

BOND - The business of the morning is frankly an experiment. We have introduced a second panel discussion into the program. Last year we had only one. We thought that after four days of lectures and discussion it would be useful and a different kind of experience for all of us to get together to consider as a group a number of questions which have been raised. I should like to keep the session as informal as possible, and I shall try, as moderator, not to interfere. There may be an occasion when I will have to exert a little bit of my temporary authority . . .

NEUSNER - You might even say, "Shut up, stupid."

BOND — ... but I shall not run this with a hard hand. We asked that you submit questions, any questions that concerned you, and I should like to start by selecting a question or two directed to each member of the panel. I'll ask each panelist to speak briefly to the question, and if thoughts occur to you as the questions are being discussed, do raise your hand, and we shall carry on from there. Why don't I start with a question submitted for Professor Neusner: "Why is dogma essential to orthodox Christianity and not to Judaism?"

NEUSNER—The main reason is that Christianity begins with the demand to believe in something or someone. There is a proposition attached to the beginning of the faith. You are saved through what you believe. This is certainly the message of Paul and the early church. Christianity stresses theology, not merely dogma in the sense of what one must believe, but theology in the sense of a systematic study of the faith and of the propositions of faith. The result of this is that the Christian, particularly the Protestant Christian, will think of religion in terms of faith. So he supposes a Jew is someone who believes A, B, C and D. When you leave the Protestant West you find that religion is a different phenomenon. It is composed of different elements, to some degree, and places much greater stress upon religion as a way of living. In pre-modern civilizations, religion is not abstracted from culture, or is abstracted much less than it is in our society.

On the other hand, it is not correct to say that Judaism does not have dogmas. It does have, or it has had, historically, a number of ideas to which most people assented. The way this consensus was reached was considerably less structured than the way the historical church reached its consensus, but it is not accurate to say that Christians believe various things and other religions —in this case Judaism — do not stress matters of belief at all. It became extremely important for the reform movement in Judaism in the 19th century and even more so today to stress that "it doesn't matter whether you believe A, B, C or D, for you can still be a good Jew." The reason that it was so important for them to say so is that a great many people didn't believe in these things and wanted very much to think of themselves as good Jews. But this is, I think, a datum, a fact in the history of Judaism rather than a description of the whole of the Jewish tradition.

BOND—We are starting with relatively easy questions. I am saving some of the more complex ones. Someone wanted to ask Larry Smith why The Lonely Crowd hasn't played a greater part as yet in the lectures and the seminars.

SMITH - I'm glad this was asked. I want you all to know that my frustration is at least equal to yours. We haven't yet talked about The Great Gatsby or Manchild in thePromised Land or The Lonely Crowd. Riesman's book was, for me personally, one of the most important I have ever read in my life. Now what I intend to do is to talk next time about the relevance or irrelevance of the success ethic to the American Negro in a lecture which I will call "We made it - why can't they?" And then in the last lecture I will try what will undoubtedly be an impossible task, to speak to the relevance of the ethic today in much more direct terms by talking about, among other things, Gatsby and certainly Riesman but in a larger context.

BOND - Here's one for Arthur Luehrmann. "What, if any, denominator in science and literature is common in the liberating arts?"

LUEHRMANN - The coward's way out would be to say they had absolutely nothing in common, but that is not quite right, at least in my view. I think that making such a dichotomy between science and literature is to show that one is a child of our times. I suppose that one would not call the writings of Galileo literature today, although they were written as dialogues, a popular literary form then. They were intended for any man who could read. Not many could but all who could were expected to be able to understand the writings of Galileo. I think, however, that the person who asked this question meant literature in the sense of the human comedy or the humanistic novel. The novel, I think, represents literature to more people today than any other form. The novel, however, is quite modern, a quite contemporary notion. It deals more often than not with the response of an individual or a group of individuals to a certain situation. Science is also a response, although it requires a different kind of vocabulary. It even requires a different language, the language of mathematics. Nevertheless it is the response of people to the condition in which they find themselves, and I think in that sense there is a common element between literature and science. I think that is the best or at least the most affirmative statement I can make.

BOND - I wonder if the scientists and the literary men don't touch fingers in one act, the act of imagination. LUEHRMANN - Yes, I would say so definitely. They are both creating in the void, as it were.

BOND — We remember that Shelley called Lord Bacon a poet, and certainly the scientist's imaginative leap to the hypothesis is a poetic action.

LUEHRMANN - I agree with you completely, and I am glad that you brought that out in the lecture the other day. The scientific method - the Baconian method - is fobbed off on our children in high school far too often as the way in which science progresses, and I think that your presentation is much more accurate.

SMITH - May I climb in here just a moment? This running discourse between the two cultures which has arisen between Professors Bond and Luehrmann has been very interesting from my point of view, for I think the one kind of discipline or set of disciplines in which an older, less humanistic kind of scientific approach is being celebrated and practiced is in the social sciences. Many of these - I mean the behavioral sciences - many of these, I think, often delude themselves into thinking that they, contrary to the humanistic approach which Professor Luehrmann uses, really are representing objective reality. This makes fun for the historians, who see themselves, at least some of us do, as both humanists and social scientists, and it explains the History Department's reluctance to move into Dartmouth's new social science center in Silsby Hall.

NEUSNER - The word science in our culture means "natural science" or "scientific method." But the word in European languages simply means knowledge. In German they say wissenschaft, meaning: knowledge systematically pursued. In no way do I see myself as less of a scientist than Mr. Luehrmann. We are studying different phenomena. We are trying to understand them. Our methods and our inquiries may be very different, but we all - and I think this includes the creative artist - we all are pursuing knowledge. So I think that the American usage is not a successful one. The Russians particularly use the word "science" in the broader sense to mean knowledge. A book of "popular science" in the Soviet Union refers to a book in which a good scholar tries to explain his findings to a broad audience. Now imagine popular science in America - what that raises in our minds!

BOND — As this topic has developed it has touched upon a number of questions which are here on the table. "Please comment on the tendency of sociology and psychology increasingly to claim the relative accuracy of truth of the physical sciences."

NEUSNER - We already did.

BOND — Jack, don't you have the distinction between different disciplines emerging again the minute you introduce the question of values? You can have quantitative and descriptive science, but when you begin to ask what is good and what is bad you begin to get into a different area. I was amused, as a humanist, when we introduced our wonderful machine here, the computer. The first problem we had with it was a moral problem, and the machine couldn't provide any answer. The problem was what is a fair distribution of time for the people using it. Some people wanted to take more than their share.

You notice that I omitted myself in parceling out these questions. Now, I'm afraid, I've got to come to me. "Professor Bond, since the brain is actually a piece of machinery, and thought is a mechanical process" - is that true? - "is it not possible, even probable, that it will be the scientist who will eventually solve humanistic problems by creating a better balance in the individual between opposing mental forces - that is, in responsiveness to positive and negative stimuli?"

Well I don't know what the brain is and I don't think I would accept the idea that it is merely mechanical, although I confess my own ignorance. But even supposing it to be only a mechanism and that someone knew all about how it works, the question finally has to be asked, "What is a better balance in the individual?" If you are going to balance people, what kind of a balance do you want and to what end should it be directed? Is it going to be the end of the society in Brave New World, stability? The people there are utterly thoughtless, but they are balanced, they are happy. All their appetites are instantly gratified, and if they have any problems there is always soma, their version of some of the "trips" we now hear about.

SMITH - Harry, did you read that there is now an organization known as Soma in England trying to propagate a doctrine which would justify the use of various drugs?

BOND — I am reminded of a psychiatrist, a very famous one, named Skinner. Some of you know his book Walden II. I didn't ask you to read it because I do not think it has the stature or gets as close to the center of things as Brave NewWorld does. Skinner is the creator of what is known as the Skinner Box. This is a glass cage into which you put a baby the minute it's born, and the box continues to create the conditions of the womb for a long period of time. The traumatic shock of coming into this miserable world — we come crying in and go crying out - the shock is reduced. But who wants to have his child in a box?

NEUSNER - Don't be so sure.

BOND — Or if there were this knowledge about man and all his mysteries were plucked out, and if there were controllers, there still is the question asked as long ago as Juvenal in Roman times, "Who controls the controllers?"

LUEHRMANN - Or even earlier than that in Plato. "Who shall guard the guardians?" There is a thread of this latent fear of scientific knowledge running through more recent literature in the Faustian theme. One bargains one's humanity in a pact with the devil for the sake of knowledge. Or, on a more popular level, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein it is the mad scientist who corrupts human values in his inhuman quest for knowledge. I think this view is mildly hysterical and takes us farther from that union which we should seek between the humanitarian and scientific sides of our character. The fearful view says, "Shun this way"; it does not say, "Understand it." It says, "Shun this way. I can pursue my happy life with the knowledge I have now." That is a sort of Brave New World; there is no progress there. It is a thoughtless and unrealistic world, indeed, because it rejects a whole side of man's thought. I think one has to put this side into the mixture if one is to achieve a balance between the search for knowledge and its wise use within the finite lifetime of people.

One's language in dealing with knowledge is of a permanent nature. One likes to think of eternal verities, and yet we suspect that even our ''natural laws" are transient. And therefore we have to make the wise use of knowledge from our own point of view. We are selfish and we perhaps ought to see it that way. This is not an altruistic act; this is a selfish act. We as people want to lead the best lives that we as people can lead. This causes us to set up the slaughter house, for example, and we should face up to that. We are not concerned with the value of life in the abstract; we are concerned about our lives, and to lead happy lives we have to acknowledge both the kind of understanding in which we are small and subject to natural law and the understanding in which we are large and exercise human will, the will that causes slaughter houses to be set up. Somehow to be happy we have to have all of that in our minds at the same time. It's no wonder we are a little bit neurotic.

BOND - How are you using the word altruism?

LUERHMANN - Altruism in the sense of seeing ourselves as a part of life and being kind to life itself.

BOND — Altruism in this question submitted to Professor Neusner has a different sense, I think. The question reads, "Does altruism exist, or can it be entirely explained away by neo-Freudianism or a mechanistic universe?"

NEUSNER - Well, I object to the words "explained away." I object to the idea that "explaining away" is what is happening when we make a deeper inquiry into the patterns of gratification of pain-pleasure to be discerned in mankind and in ourselves. Understanding how things are with as small a quotient of fantasy and delusion as is possible - I think this is an absolute good. The truth does liberate people. People who live their lives by fantasies, when these fantasies can be seen through and understood, are cripples. They are creating an unreal world and depriving themselves and other people around them of a real world. Now, if this is "explaining away" some value in terms of some other value deeper and more congruent to the lives of people - yes, then I think there is no such thing as altruism. That kind of view of human behavior which supposes there is not some element of gratification, however paradoxical, in all behavior is false. There is an element of gratification in all human behavior. I certainly hope there is.

BOND - You qualified what you said about fantasy: "fantasy when it can be seen through." But supposing you see through all the fantasies and end up with mere mechanism and utter pointlessness and the wind goes around and the sun also arises and there is nothing new and there is no point to human existence. Where do you come out? Suppos- ing there is no fantasy left?

NEUSNER - I think that the truth is fantasy enough.

BOND - That's just in private.

NEUSNER - No. What bothers me very much about everybody, myself and all of us included, is that we think we are better off with our neuroses and our fantasies than without them. We forget that we are standing in the way of our own liberation. The most courageous people in the world are those who are willing to undergo the enormously agonizing process of psychoanalysis. I know that in the generation of most of you here psychoanalysis and psychiatry, indeed even the study of psychology, were regarded with enormous suspicion and hostility. And I am certainly not here to preach the gospel of Sigmund Freud, even though I think there is much truth to be learned from him. But we are now living in a world where we are not afraid of ourselves and our so-called baser emotions. We are trying to accept ourselves as we are and that means all of ourselves, both the altruistic and the selfish, both the materialistic and the spiritual - to accept but to create with all our being. This is one very noble quest that modern men are undertaking. I doubt that any generation of men has been so courageous as our generation, a generation willing to look within ourselves with as much honesty, as much courage, as we are capable of. The generation which is passing wanted very desperately not to see the world and themselves as they are, wanted to be able to explain everything they did by reference to a particular pattern of piety or convention, a pattern supposed to sustain them. This was a highly ritualistic structure of reality - and rather infantile.

BOND — Well, is it the role (as somebody asked in one of these questions) of the college teacher to encourage our 18, 19, 20, 21-year-old boys to look into themselves? "What should be the role of a teacher at college," asked the questioner, "challenger or defender of beliefs of the democracy?"

SMITH - This point was raised in one of the discussions in which I participated and I put forth this proposition. I believe that the role of a teacher is two-fold. First, to speak the truth as he sees it, being simultaneously aware, of course, that it's a tentative truth but still an operational truth and the best that he can arrive at. And secondly, that he try at the same time to encourage a student to think for himself even to the point of examining critically the teacher's own perception of truth. That's a very demanding kind of request to make of a human being, because as you work down these two roads there comes a point where they crisscross and it's extremely difficult to ask a person to examine critically a truth which you hold passionately after long thought and extensive reflection and examination.

NEUSNER — We are experts about college professors. We are not experts about life. My friend Mr. Lord reminded me today that we are still babies in his eyes and he's right.

SMITH - Herb Hill, who was chairman of the History Department, said about young instructors, you get along fine for two years; you have no worry for two years as long as you don't hit a student or run away with the Dean's wife. That's very broad permissiveness, wouldn't you say?

NEUSNER - Which Dean?

SMITH - This becomes increasingly a problem at Dartmouth because there are so many.

NEUSNER — We qualified to join this faculty by going through an apprenticeship and mastering a particular discipline of scholarship, whether it be physics or sociology or English or any other field. This does not make us moral paragons and it was not intended to. We are not here to be substitute parents for our' students, because we are not qualified. We haven't the training and the experience which would give us the right to play that particular role. So none of the roles described in the question seems to be relevant to what we are really trying to do and are here to do. I will give you one marvelous example. We are not trained in group dynamics. Now we should be, probably, but we are not; and that means that college professors are not notoriously good discussion leaders. They are teachers. Teachers in the American university generally teach through talking to and with people, answering their questions. It is very rare for us to be called upon to teach through other people's thoughts and ideas, indeed, to develop discussion as a way of making a point, partly because it seems rather a slow way of doing things and partly because it seems rather indirect. Within that limitation some of you will understand why we talk too much.

BOND - Although as the author of a course in styles of life you will be quick to realize that there are different styles of teaching and different convictions.

LUEHRMANN - I take a hard line on this. I say that a university that lacks controversy is no university at all. Its business in fact is controversy. Established truths you don't have to set up a university for! They should be manifest to the man on the street. The business of the university is to stir up trouble, to raise troublesome ideas, examine them, turn them over, see if they have any viability, lay them to rest when they die.

NEUSNER - But that's a good definition of scholarship.

BOND - Very close to that. I would say our mission is the creation of discontent, as somebody who tries to bring to young inquiring minds some of the best literature in our tongue. We include Paradise Lost for example in our freshman work, and I am very proud that we do this, proud of the Dartmouth English Department. One of the first things we ask our students to do is to try to rise up to the level of this work. Try to grow up to it. The same thing is true of any Shakespearean play. We ourselves are constantly trying to do it, although it's impossible ever to fully arrive so you can stand where Milton stood when he wrote Paradise Lost. Nonetheless the experience of trying to rise up to it creates a great deal of discontent with what is cheap and tawdry and false and shabby and weak and poor in our society.

SMITH - But, Harry, this really presumes that there is a system of values which you can perceive and which all of us can perceive which will, if applied efficiently, tell us what is tawdry and shabby and cheap. It seems to me that your own assertion that you want education to create discontent would not only create a discontent with such things as applications but even with the criteria themselves. What if one person says this is shabby and the other says this is important?

BOND — Well I don't accept moral and ethical and aesthetic relativism — the tyranny of this thing. I think we do know what is good. I believe along with Matthew Arnold in the 19th century - and he is, I'll confess, one of my heroes - that we do have in the great literature of the past (I'll even use his offensive phrase) touchstones, that there are magnificent achievements of the human spirit. These works we can recognize as something fine because they speak to all that is the best in us. And I don't have to be a Roman Catholic to see these in Dante, nor do I have to be, as Johnson called Milton, "a surly and acrimonious Republican" to see them in Milton. Every time I read a Shakespearean play I recognize that someone very magnificent has been here.

SMITH - But I persist, Harry; it seems to me that the phrase we use to term the best in us, as you are Willing to recognize, presupposes that you are aware of or can perceive a reasonably absolute set of values. This turns its back on the basic dilemma of modern man, which is a dilemma that requires him simultaneously to act on the basis of some sort of operational ethics and yet, at the same time, to realize that this perception of what is right or ethical is the product of his own mind in training and environment. And if we relate this to the function of the teacher, we have to balance these two; and the way we do it is that the teacher says after all the work I have been able to bring to bear on this problem, here is the truth as I see it. At the same time I will try to develop in you the capacity to see truth for yourself, but still I am going to take a stand and say this is how I see it. It seems to me we have both of those functions to perform.

NEUSNER - The university, if it is worthy of the name, is a center of learning. Learning can take place in a number of ways. One is certainly through scholarship, which ultimately means a rigorous rethinking, a very critical rethinking, of these "non-relative" values and ideas and inheritances in which you seem to place so much stock, Harry. Our job is not to suppose that there is a best literature, more noble than all, as if knowledge were relatively fixed and literature were relatively complete and as if our task were simply to transmit a fairly well-established legacy. The task of the student and the teacher alike is to suppose that nothing is fixed and to see within that context what we can affirm. This is affirmation with open arms. This is a holding, a loving, with open arms. I have never, if I may say so, lived in a more parochial environment than this one, because people here seem so certain that we know the truth, that our job is to transmit it and merely to convince other people of it.

SMITH - You mean American society, Jack, by this parochial environment? Is that what you meant, that American society is that parochial?

NEUSNER - Are you getting me off some hook that I didn't recognize to begin with? No, to be very honest, I mean small-town Yankee rural society, not American society. Good Lord, American society is the whole world! I mean the society which is awfully, awfully sure of itself and sure that the so-called "outside world" is a threat to its values and security. You see, here the Jews as a group have a tremendous advantage, Larry, because the situation you so beautifully describe, the situation of modern man, has been very much the Jewish situation. The Jews have lived in a great many cultures and environments. They have preserved a continuity in these environments, both international and temporal continuity. They have always known that the things they hold most dear, the things which they think are absolutely self-evident, such as revelation from Sinai or the centrality of Torah - they know because of their situation in history and life that these self-evident truths are not widely held. There is a whole world that regards these truths as untrue or outdated or evil. Jews have managed to see the world as pluralistic when other people saw it as unitary. They have managed to see the values and ideals which other men hold to be the given as something to be criticized and perhaps even to be elevated. It is this perspective which other men, modern men, are now coming into. This is the perspective of the city, the perspective of secularly, of worldliness. This is the perspective of an international environment where we know that there is not any one language which is civilized or "right." There isn't any one culture which is all-pervasive. You talk about the beauties of literature as if "okay there's Shakespeare," but there are whole literatures which none of us in this room has read. How are we supposed to know then that there is some absolute aesthetic value? The moment we grant that there is an absolute aesthetic value which pertains just to the literature of the English language in a particular period (since certainly the 20th century isn't much quoted around here), we have entered a universe of relativity, a universe where our values seem to us to be just good for us, but not necessarily good for the man next door or the man in the country next door.

That's the world we seem to be living in, not because we want it, not because it's right, but because it has come upon us. Many of the reasons it has come upon us are purely technical. The distance, for example, between New York City and Chicago in 1900 was far greater in terms of time and effort of travel than the distance now between New York and Moscow or Peking or Jerusalem. Now that's one fact, and of course we could multiply these facts endlessly. The world has changed and it's a very hard thing to live through.

LUEHRMANN - I want to make one comment with respect to Larry Smith's analysis of the role of the professor. I agree with him personally but not necessarily professionally that the function is two-fold. There is a responsibility to speak out, to profess in fact the truth as he sees it; and then there is the responsibility to teach the student. I think the first is more a responsibility to self from which, of course, the student and society at large may well profit. But in his role as teacher I think he must ask more questions than he answers or he has not done his job properly. He must develop critical attitudes, in so far as he stands before his students and demands some response from them. Now, when he stands up and demands no response from anybody, that is when he is professing the truth as he sees it.

SMITH - I couldn't agree with you more. That very much helps me too. Let me just say that there is a form of teacher - like doctors we don't like to criticize our colleagues - but there is a breed of college teacher whom we might call an academic demagogue and this is, I think, why I kind of resist some of the usual phrases such as "we must develop absolute skepticism and ferment" because one way that an academic demagogue does this is to go to one class, as one of our colleagues actually did (an excellent teacher, by the way) and said "Franklin Roosevelt was the savior of capitalism, the savior of democracy." The next hour he went into another section of the same course and said that Franklin Roosevelt was the man who finally sold away our ultimate values of civilization such as capitalism and democracy. Then he gave a test on what the New Deal was and he got back answers reflecting this lecture from this section and the other lecture from the other section. In other words, they had not engaged their critical abilities at all and. of course, he became very dissatisfied. You see, the point to me is not whether Franklin Roosevelt was'good or bad, but what was Franklin Roosevelt as best you can see it as a matter of analytic perception, and then to encourage the student to engage himself with the logic and evidence that make a case analytically and to develop his own perception.

NEUSNER — Is this what you said was an academic demagogue? Scholarship means to copy from the other fellow and say it in your own name and put him in the footnotes.

QUESTION FROM FLOOR TO PROFESSOR BOND - Isn't the role of the teacher to create a divine discontent rather than a malcontent, a discontent because of an awareness of higher and better things?

BOND - I think I would personally agree with this. This fits into the thing. I want to answer Jack Neusner if I can by reference to Alfred Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon first, and secondly by a Shakespearean sonnet. You will remember that Darkness at Noon is about the Moscow trials of the late thirties and the old Bolshevik Rubashov. As the novel opens the cell door slams on Rubashov and his first thought is - so I shall be shot. He was one of the leaders of the revolution and he knew he was going to be shot, and so you stay with Rubashov inside that cell for a long time and you have flashbacks of his life and thoughts about man. With the executioner there the final questions are faced. Somebody mentioned the human condition this morning. Pascal saw humanity in a room - everybody in an enormous room and every now and then half a dozen people are taken out to have their throats cut. This is the human condition, he said, and faced with that you think, try to think what it's all about. Rubashov thought a lot and he thought first of all that the I, the first person singular which the party had referred to as the "grammatical fiction," somehow had a reality. Secondly he thought that what was wrong with the revolution and the whole communist establishment was that they were not sailing with cultural ballast. They used that phrase and they used another phrase: we are breeding in the young communists a generation born without umbilical cords. That is to say a group of people with no nourishment from history, from the past. And then there are other questions. Rubashov remembered that he had read an article years and years ago, when he had been in prison, about the universe expanding and it was torn out of a newspaper and he never found out the end of the article. Was it really expanding? And then he thought maybe this is another fault with us in our society, we never ask those fundamental questions about the universe. He thinks that he should have said to the prosecutor as he was prosecuting him as a traitor to the party - What about the universe, citizen prosecutor?

All of this is to suggest that it is of the utmost importance to me that we do preserve, however parochial it may seem, in the modern world, those elements of our tradition, the Western tradition, which we must decide are great and good. Why, Jack, has Homer been translated into every language that I know of? Why is Shakespeare translated? To whom do they speak? Why do people want to read these things? Let's just look at Sonnet 65:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

And I submit that this is known as something good and fine and human to Greeks, Italians, Russians, Indonesians, Indians, Jews, South Africans, and the Ugandans.

[Silence followed.]

NEUSNER - Amen! I can't argue with religion. It's certainly rude to upset a prayer meeting. But I would like to say two things, one specific and one general. Specifically, I wonder whether the ideal of love's abiding and enduring over all the changes of time and so forth - I wonder whether the ideal is so universal. We can trace its history right back to a particular point in medieval culture. We can pursue its development and growth in Western culture. This is not an ideal which is universal, indeed which would even be comprehended in Japan for one thing. It wouldn't be comprehended in enormous parts of mankind. In general, I do not for one minute suggest that these are things we should not study. I want my students to read the great achievements of the spirit of the West. I would like to be able to appropriate them, to integrate these achievements into our own lives, values, and perspectives. Nothing which I said contradicts that hope for our students or for our culture. What I said is that we have got to retain the recognition that these are ours and yet not universal, that our values are relative. The challenge to our culture, to America, and even to Yankee small-town America, is not to give up its past but to recognize that it is merely one option open to mankind, one alternative among many. But it is an alternative which has great value. It is very precious. But it is only one way of doing things. It is only one way of living life.

The idea which is so stirring in that sonnet concerns the eternity of love. This is a very beautiful idea, but don't try to tell me that somebody in Uganda would understand it unless we know that he would. It may well be the case, but there is no point in sitting and saying, "Now isn't this great! How can anybody not see this is great?" It is one thing to say, "Yes, this is great, to this I commit myself." It is another thing to say, "Therefore this is true for all mankind." The problem that the Christian West has is to recover the insistence of St. Paul that values are not rooted in reality, but may very well be against reality. What was faith to the Christian? Was it, that everybody agreed with him? That the cross was an immediately evocative symbol in Rome or in Ephesus? Or was Paul saying, "Yes faith is pretty much what everybody does. To be a Christian is normal, natural, and routine in the world. Therefore we are right!" Is this what Christianity said to itself in the early centuries? Was this its view of human culture? Or was its view of human culture - Faith is despite the world? Faith is the capacity to believe something even though the world does not reassure you, even if you do not attain support for what you regard as the eternal verities by imposing them upon all mankind.

SMITH - I just want to mention, Jack, that I have always been intrigued by the assumption by urban scholars that somehow provinciality is an exclusive characteristic of small-town America. My own experience is that it is a rather universal trait.

But to get back to Harry's point, I want to get at Harry from a different angle. It has to do with the question of dogma, because as I understand it, I think I'm probably closer here to Jack than I am to Harry, but maybe not. A usual application, it seems to me, is that if you cut yourself off from the past you are somehow going to open yourself up to a kind of tyranny. But there is a broader frame in which we might understand this. My enemy is dogma, unreflected, accepted, absolute dogma. Now there is the dogma which says there is no history and we will create you anew each time, according to the needs of the party or the state, and that is something I'm fundamentally opposed to. There is also the tyranny of a dogma which says all perceptions of truth and good are something already perceived by the past and are simply a constant reappreciation of that. Not that this is Harry's argument, I should hope. And what I would like to pose is that a more traditional American approach to the perception of truth or what is right is a pragmatic one because if there is any peculiar American philosophy, it's the philosophy of pragmatism which holds, as I understand it, that truth is something which meets a need for operational criteria. You are living, you must have something which will help you work in life, and yet you are aware that these truths are not absolute and unchanging; therefore you have a continuous process of revising a tentative truth, acting upon it and having the courage - and it takes a great deal of courage - to act upon something you know is not absolute, all the while having the courage to assert it and then to revise it and to live upon it.

BOND - I guess I have to respond. I don't disagree with you; in fact I couldn't agree more with your saying the enemy is dogma, but I have two things I really want to say. I'd like to suggest the notion of what I call the open market, what has been called by great people in the past the open marketplace of truth. This is in Milton's Areopagitica, a very great defense of freedom of the press. And who shall fear (I'm not quoting accurately, I'm sorry; his prose is harder to memorize than his poetry) who shall fear, he says, so long as truth is in the field. If you keep the market open. That's the key, and that's why places like Dartmouth exist and that is why Arthur is right about controversy. This is the group dedication each of us has. So long as the marketplace is open for the exchange of ideas, you have a faith, and it's no more than a faith, that truth will win out. Now every poem, I'd like to say, is in competition - now that we have one world - in competition with every other poem that has ever been written. You think of that the next time you try to write a sonnet. And that poem is viewed by its reader in relation to all the other poems he knows. So long as there is an open marketplace poems and ideas will be exchanged, they will be judged against each other. The true ones have a way of lasting. Jack Neusner said values are not rooted in reality. Not rooted in reality and yet in the few years of human history some values have persisted as central forces in human action and that would seem to me to be real. To me the minute that the marketplace and exchange of ideas breaks down we are in very bad trouble.

SMITH (responding to a question from the floor) - May I just plead with you all to try to remember that my inarticulateness evidently has made it unclear that my position is that of a pragmatist as distinguished from a relativist. I believe there are truths that we must somehow construct and that we must organize our lives on that basis. I also realize that these are things which we will have to revise and which are somewhat tentative, but we must have the courage to act upon them. That's something quite different from a view that says there are no values. Relativism very easily leads into nihilism, and it's an attempt to avoid that.

LUEHRMANN - I am not sure whether I am a relativist or a pragmatist, but let me make an analogy or a metaphor of some kind. Suppose one says, as seems quite defensible, that the English language is as good as the French. If the next thing one says is, "Therefore let us teach no language, I think he has quite obviously made a mistake. I hope relativism doesn't lead us that way. On the other hand, one can say, "We'll learn a language that will be useful." That's a pragmatic solution to the problem of communication. One isn't raising absolutes, one is simply saying, "I have found it convenient to learn a language. Why don't you try?"

NEUSNER - What are the situations in recent history in which clear-cut nihilism has emerged? Has the collapse of values come about among groups or in societies which preserve a measure of skepticism about their own values? Or have we seen the most nihilistic movements, the negation of all values in favor of the convenience of the state, in the Soviet or in the Nazi party in Germany? These movements developed in highly structured, very rigid societies and cultures. It is very hard for me to see nihilism as the natural result of a tentativeness about values. It is very easy for me to see nihilism as a result of a collapse of a very, rigid system of values.

SMITH - It seems to me that there have been very few instances since man has become aware of the relative or has been shaped by his personal history and his society where it has led to widespread nihilism. What you get instead is often a kind of hectic and fanatic attempt to construct an absolute dogma, and this is particularly clear in Germany where, above all, the Germans were the first to understand the so-called sociology of knowledge which has led many people to a kind of relativism. But the society at large instead of responding in terms of nihilism turned - and I don't see Nazism as nihilism in any analytic way - to an assertion of absolute dogma. They weren't saying that nothing is right so let's do as we please; they were saying this is the absolute right so we must do it.

FROM THE FLOOR — We have a new danger against freedom and the open marketplace through the effectiveness of the instruments of conditioning. And freedom of the press is threatened.

SMITH - I spend a great deal of time in my course here on political techniques which includes precisely what you are talking about, and I have a running narrative of how this began early in the century with very simple techniques by Theodore Roosevelt and then by Wilson and on up until finally you get probably its most sophisticated refinement in John Kennedy's administration. Now it seems to me what has happened, and I have been rather encouraged by this line of thought, is that the press has taken a new look at itself and has developed a resistance to this kind of management. In fact, it was the press itself that began to talk about the management of the news which then gave us a kind of reflective sense of this technique. Now let me give you one case in point to illustrate. You remember when Robert Kennedy made a speech on the floor of the Senate about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, who needless to say was displeased with Kennedy's remarks, tried to blanket this speech in the press by releasing a letter to Kosygin and by making a statement and by a whole bunch of other things that would supposedly take all the headlines away from Bobby Kennedy and put him on page 13. Now this is a typical and traditional device, and when we talk about management of the news that's what we mean in technique. What happened? The press on its front page the next day and in every evening newscast reported that Robert Kennedy made a speech in the Senate and the President of the United States tried to blanket that speech on the front page. It is a very encouraging thing that we are growing more sophisticated in that way.

BOND - I think this is the time for us to end our discussion. I'm not going to attempt to summarize everything, but we came, as I think most of us expected, to a concern with the question of values, whether relative or whether there can be absolutes, and how these fit in with the questions posed by Utopia and other works: What is a good life for man?

Jacob Neusner Arthur Luehrmann Harold Bond Larry Smith

Professor Bond lecturing in Dartmouth Hall.

Professor Neusner lecturing on Judaism.

Mr. Smith discussing Success in American values.

Professor Luehrmann presenting the scientist's viewpoint,