Contingencies

John Kenneth Galbraith

A FEW days after the resumption of nuclear tests — after the long moratorium, when it seemed that restraint and good sense had arrested the terrible contest which the tests signified — I had a talk with an old friend in Washington, He asked me what would have happened if the United States had been the first to take this grim and fateful step. He answered his own question: a multitude of critics would everywhere have condemned the action.

‟Why,” he inquired, ‟is the United States government so much more subject to criticism than the governments of other countries?”

There is a related question which is frequently asked of me in India. It is, ‟Why are your papers and your political leaders so severe in their treatment of India?” Surely, it is suggested, there are more iniquitous objects of attack than this mild and friendly land. ‟Why do you search so assiduously for our faults? Why do you pick on Mr. Nehru?”

Any satisfactory answer to these questions must deal with the peculiar and often paradoxical role of criticism in the open society, in that society which not only accords opportunity but offers encouragement to a plurality of views, and in which it is assumed that every persuasively argued idea can have an influence, however marginal, on the march of events.

Let me say at the outset that I am not much inclined to efforts to gloss over or explain the unexplainable. There have been some aspects of recent critical comment which do not seem to me entirely encouraging or defensible. I detect a certain tendency to conclude that if it is necessary to rebuke one of the two great powers, something fairly stern must also be said about the other. Morality, I think we may agree, is not always in the middle. In the case of the nuclear test resumption. the United States was pressing actively and in good faith for a treaty at the time the tests were resumed. A diligent effort to end the tests and a unilateral step to resume them are not open to equal criticism.

There is another tendency in criticism which I doubt that anyone would condone. Some countries. never without effort, have schooled themselves to a tolerant response when attacked. They do not strike back; certainly they do not respond with threats or sanctions. It would be unfortunate if any of us, in our natural and inevitable desire to mend the manners and behavior and policies of others, were to concentrate on the safest and most amiable targets. Perhaps this does not happen very often: I believe that we should be on guard against the temptation. Let me turn now to a more agreeable and constructive role of criticism, which it is equally important that we understand.

The peculiarities and paradoxes of criticism in the open society can initially be illustrated by examining recent American comment on public education. In the United States we have the world’s oldest system of universal primary education. We also have the world’s most diverse and imaginative and, in many respects, most highly developed system of secondary education. American colleges and universities were the first in the world to make higher education a democratic right. Until they did so, university education had always been the privilege of a minute intellectual,