Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

THE SON OF A SERVANT, the excellent translation by Evert Sprinchorn of the first volume of AUGUST STRINDBERG’S autobiography (Doubleday-Anchor, $1-25), is a moving account of the early life of the great Swedish playwright. It portrays vividly the restrictive family life and the cold middle-class conventions of Stockholm which made Strindberg a rebel and a critic of society. The emotions of an unhappy childhood and adolesence gain force from the eloquence of the sparse, almost laconic, sentences in which they are phrased.

The book reminds us of the close links between science and literature in the nineteenth century. The preoccupation of naturalists like Strindberg and Gorki with the self was not capricious or egocentric, but an effort to use new knowledge to illuminate the problems of man. Strindberg believed that literature had to free itself from art and become a science, absorb all the information the experimental disciplines generated and even adopt their techniques. The autobiography was scientific because it was a medium through which the writer could keep a single human being, himself, under constant observation through a long course of development. The attempt to apply these assumptions expressed the desire of a whole literary generation, which began with Darwin and ended with Freud, to cope with the problems raised by the discoveries of science.

Despite its importance in their lives, science remains an alien domain to most men of the 1960s. The very characteristics that contribute to its success inhibit easy comprehension of its results. The rapid pace of discovery renders many of its findings obsolete belore they are digested. Furthermore, professionalization and the specialization of modes of inquiry, language, and technique make it difficult for all but the initiate to absorb ongoing developments. Popularizations, by the process of simplification, often unintentionally falsify, for they create an impression of certainty, precision, and definitiveness quite foreign to the actualities of creative science.

The gap in the common understanding of science is widened by the tendency to identify it with technology. We are familiar with jets and television, however little we may know of electronic physics, and we imagine that it is the purpose of science to produce these objects for our convenience and welfare. Research is development, the laboratory a branch of industry. The scientific enterprise is thus expected to be safe, highly organized, and practical.

This is the picture, for instance, that emerges from SCIENCE: U.S.A. (Viking, $7.95) by WILLIAM GILMAN. In this volume, the associate editor of Popular Science has compiled a useful survey of the state of American science in the 1960s. There are lucid descriptions of the Establishment, its laboratories and its connections with government, as well as clear accounts of recent developments in medicine, biology, and physics.

Gilman is by no means complacent. He is aware of the incompetents and predators and of the social irresponsibility, the “recklessness, arrogance, and petulant demands of a self-anointed aristocracy.” Yet his standards are primarily those of practicality. Hence he criticizes recent astronomy because it is “heavily theoretical” and “overlooks practical needs,” as if it were the primary function of scientists to supply data for NASA.

The test of practicality is particularly attractive to new disciplines anxious to establish themselves in public esteem and in their claims for financial support. JOHN MANN’S CHANGING HUMAN BEHAVIOR (Scribner’s, $5.95), for instance, envisions a mammoth Human Development Corporation (HDC) that would apply the most powerful analytic weapons to die fulfillment of man’s potential. Housed “in a large, modern building, such as is identified with any corporation,” HDC would electronically store information on behavior and at the same time experiment on an international sample of individuals. “Practitioners of known repute from various parts of the world including Yogis, shamans, and psychiatrists” would each apply their own procedure to patients “under scientifically controlled circumstances” to test the effectiveness of various methods.

Professor Mann is a serious social psychologist, and the bulk of his book consists of sober descriptions of various techniques for altering human behavior. His vision of the ideal scientific enterprise is an interesting illustration of the faith in large-scale organization as a means of attaining certitude and practical results.

The pity is that the distorted popular view, confirmed by many scientists, obscures another, perhaps more important, aspect of science: its imaginative, speculative character, which should be as exciting to our generation as Darwin was to Strindberg’s. The astronomers, using great automated instruments which listen through radio windows, have discovered altogether new quasars (quasi-stellar objects), which challenge accepted conceptions of the universe. Microbiologists, using molecular microscopes, have raised novel questions about the nature of the human organism.

Science for the explorer is not so much a treasury of information as a process of continuing discovery. The scientist does not become more certain as his work progresses; often, indeed, the result of a discovery is to uncover the extent of man’s ignorance and to convert certainties into questions. Only by direct contact with the thought of the scientists can one glimpse the excited imaginations at work in their enterprises.

GALAXIES, NUCLEI AND QUASARS by FRED HOYLE (Harper & Row, $4.95) is an exuberant astronomer’s fresh look at the universe. Professor Hoyle has attempted earlier descriptions of the nature of the universe. But he is not shackled by the fear of being wrong, and he is willing to indulge in “rather whimsical fantasies.” “Conservative ideas do not pay very well, especially when dealing with a quite new phenomenon.”

Professor Hoyle’s speculations will give little immediate aid to NASA. The narrow spaces of the solar system interest him less than the immensely wider reaches of the galaxies and the quasars, those recently discovered objects far brighter than the known stars. The effort to order and explain the fresh data forces the scientist to wrestle anew with the question of the origin of the universe and the history of matter.

This is not an easy book to read, and only the technically expert will be able to judge the validity of the whole argument. But it would be a waste were the stimulus of discussion confined to the experts.

MAN ADAPTING (Yale University Press, $10.00) by RENÉ DUBOS of the Rockefeller Institute is a vivid illustration of the importance of recent changes in biology. Dr. Dubos has freed himself from the mechanistic view of the human body that once dominated medicine. Man is a social, rational, and ethical animal as well as a chemical machine; and the states of health and disease are as much the expression of the success or failure of adaptation to environmental challenges as they are chemical responses.

The author, himself a microbiologist, has canvassed a wide range of studies that treat the relationship between man and his environment. Climate, pollution, nutrition, and fluctuations in population are among the factors whose influences on health are carefully evaluated. In the light of this discussion there follows an incisive analysis of the situation in organized medicine, which continues to define all the minute particulars of life without adapting to the new problems posed by the modern social context. Dubos calls for a shift in emphasis from elementary units and reactions to the manner in which man responds to the threats he encounters in the world.

The withdrawal of Western influences from the underdeveloped major portion of the earth leaves an institutional shambles behind. The traditional modes of control have collapsed; the few intellectuals clutch at vague, unassimilated ideologies; the bureaucracies are unskilled; and the population is bewildered. The consequent disorder is everywhere painful.

In THE UNFINISHED EXPERIMENT (Praeger, $5.95), JUAN BOSCH throws light on the difficulties of establishing democracy in the Dominican Republic. A respected intellectual, a man of evident sincerity and unimpeachable integrity, a confirmed democrat and anti-Communist, Bosch was the first constitutional president of the republic after the long nightmare of Trujillo dictatorship. After seven months a military coup terminated his administration and sent him into exile. In the crisis of April, 1965, he played a curiously indecisive role, and then returned to the island, a bitter critic of American intervention. This book, written in 1964, is an effort to explain the course of events until his ouster.

The Unfinished Experiment reveals the lack of political sense that plagues so much of Latin America. Here is his “plan of action,” while president, for coping with a threat from Haiti: the Dominican Army was to mobilize on the border close to Haiti’s capital, and the Air Force would fly over Port-au-Prince warning the people to flee before the bombs fell. If absolutely essential, two or three bombs would be dropped where they would cause no casualties. No more would be necessary because Haiti’s president would thereupon resign. “But the plan had one flaw. I could confide it to no one, not even the military commanders who would participate in it.” Such fancies were the products of a mind unequipped to deal with the problems of a country in torment.

Bosch was certainly aware of his country’s grave difficulties; again and again he pleads the lack of time and the lack of resources. But the reader of this book will find no clear account of the use to which additional years and dollars would have been put, for Bosch shows little understanding of the changes required to plant democracy in a soil exhausted by decades of dictatorship. A narrow class view of society and obsessive nationalism clouded his perceptions.

These pages breathe a passionate hatred of the middle class, a romantic idealization of the masses. “The people of the slums have an integrity that makes them mentally and psychologically healthier than” the middle class, which thinks “not with its brains but with its bank account.” Poverty purifies the men on the streets and in the fields. “The thinking of the masses is clear, sometimes unexpectedly profound. It is not deformed by complexes, because the masses are true to themselves.” A man who does not understand that poverty has its vices just as wealth does is trapped by sentimentality and is not likely to inspire a sense of national solidarity.

The Dominican Republic needed help, yet Bosch was sensitive to any hint of dependence. National pride, he explains, reached far back to his childhood. “No one will ever know what my seven-year-old soul suffered at the .sight” of the Dominican flag lowered during the protectorate. “This caused me indescribable pain, and even kept me awake a long time after I had been sent to bed.” That exaggerated nationalism was no help to a small impoverished country which had to develop a cooperative relationship with its more powerful neighbor.

The United States consistently supported Bosch and expressed its disapproval of the coup that unseated him. Might the subsequent course of events have been different had he been willing to ask for aid, even intervention, to retain constitutional power? As in so many other countries, memories of colonialism and atavistic fears of subjection proved more compelling than the genuine threats to democracy.

GEORGES CONCHON’S THE SAVAGE STATE (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $4.50) is a disturbing work. In a first reading of this powerfid novel, attention focuses on the skillfully told story. Avit, a young French UNESCO bureaucrat, arrives in a newly independent African state to discover that his wife, Laure, who had left him some years earlier to become the mistress of a white man, is now living with a black cabinet minister. Everyone knows the story and how the protagonists should behave. When neither Avit nor Laure conforms to those expectations, the whole society, white and black, becomes a delirious mob, instinctively united to expel the deviants.

There is more to the book than its plot however. Every character, black and white, is remorselessly ridiculed, and it is evidence of the author’s mastery of his craft that they are credible at all. Only Avit and Laure possess redeeming qualities, he intelligence and goodwill, she the capacity for love; and those are precisely the qualities that lead to destruction. The rest of the characters— the clownish black officials, the gross white colonials, the cowardly Christian clergy, the doltish populace — are mired in their own stupidity, stifled by their own hatred. The novel draws no racial distinctions in its loathing for humanity.

Conchon has thus gone far beyond such earlier writers as Conrad, who also described the harsh effects of the Dark Continent upon the Europeans who ventured into it. For Conrad the extreme conditions of the alien environment tested men’s spirits, revealed their weaknesses and also their strength. Conchon’s judgment is much more sweeping. Africa expels Avit and Laure because it cannot tolerate intelligence or love: and contact between the races is doomed to disaster. The novel is thus a testament to the end of imperialism, to the fading of that dream of man’s universal dignity which for five hundred years animated Westerners in their contacts with the outer world.

In THREE FACES OF FASCISM (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.95) ERNST NOLTE reminds us that neither nationalism nor group hatred is peculiar to underdeveloped societies. Professor Nolte’s account of the Action Française, Mussolini’s fascism, and Hitler’s national socialism gives us a very helpful history of the antiliberal trends in the two decades before 1930.

His interpretation is open to some question however. Professor Nolte defines fascism as anti-Communism, stresses its conservative nationalism, and underplays other features at least equally important. Hitler and Mussolini were the leaders of genuine mass movements, and they consciously adopted a view of power which totally subordinated the individual to the state. In both respects, their parties differed from the much more genteel Action Française and resembled the Bolshevism of Stalin.

The failure to recognize that in the history of modern Europe fascism is important as a type of totalitarianism rather than as a type of nationalism weakens an otherwise admirable book.