"Only" Is a Big Word

The Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, where UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) convened last week, contained memorials, by name or statue, to such disparate pairs as Pascal and Descartes, Richelieu and Voltaire, whose conflicting thoughts had been merged (more or less) in the stream of French culture. Next day UNESCO moved to its regular quarters in the battered old Hotel Majestic (now UNESCO House), where it beheld another reminder that conflict sometimes ends in union: the room was dominated by a Gobelin tapestry, The Wounded Poms Being Taken before Alexander the Great. If the Macedonian could forgive, admire and love the utterly alien prince who fought him bitterly and well on the banks of the Hydaspes, might not UNESCO's nations reconcile their educational, scientific and cultural enmities?

Already, the delegates were agreed on UNESCO's high mission as written into its charter last year in London: ". . . it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." But how? Russia's failure to join UNESCO emphasized the differences of ideology which were more important than rivalry over military bases or oil wells. Most delegates seemed to think, as did the U.S.'s Archibald MacLeish, that a "common denominator" could be found that would cover all the world. Julian Huxley, secretary of UNESCO's Preparatory Commission, expressed this hope last week. He said: "The participation of the U.S.S.R. in UNESCO would be a mutual benefit in facilitating the reconciliation of the conflicting ideologies which now threaten to divide the world--the reconciliation in some common philosophy not too ambitious in its ideology but more humbly, though perhaps more securely grounded in a practical program of common action designed to combat ignorance and misunderstanding."

In spite of its modest tone, this proposal itself reflected a controversial proposition : that two or more basic philosophies could peaceably co-exist in one world. When Vladislav Ribnikar, Yugoslavia's official observer (his country has not joined UNESCO), rose to speak, the delegates heard an approach less broadly tolerant than Huxley's. Ribnikar said that UNESCO's charter failed to take into account Marxist dialectical materialism and, by this failure, prevented "intellectual cooperation . . . especially between the Western countries and the Soviet Union."

Ribnikar made clear the exclusive "monistic" claims of Marxism as the only true faith. Ribnikar mumbled, but the delegates caught his meaning when he said:

"No one can contest that in the history of humanity all progress has been tied to materialist thought and that only dialectical materialism has succeeded in confirming by the experience of everyday life the scientific principles.

"Can one proclaim as official for the United Nations a speculative philosophy that calls itself a kind of philosophical Esperanto and as a consequence not recognize and even reject from the cultural sphere a philosophy which has become the point of view of millions of men in every country?"

In UNESCO's practical work of spreading ideas of peace and cooperation, it would certainly come up repeatedly against this ideological analogy to the Security Council veto. That prospect did not necessarily make UNESCO's task impossible; conflicting ideologies had been put together before. But it was worth noting (lest the world delude itself as to the difficulties facing UNESCO) that such sentiments as Ribnikar's were not those with which Alexander and Porus met in friendship on the fertile Punjab plain.

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