BEYOND THE MACHINE: MAN'S GOOD JUDGEMENT

Novelist WILLIAM FAULKNER, in a letter to the New York TIMES:

This is about the Italian airliner which undershot the runway and crashed* at [New York's] Idlewild [ Airport ] after failing three times to hold the instrument glide-path which would have brought it down to the runway. It is written on the idea that the instrument or instruments--altimeter-cum-drift-indicator--failed or had failed, was already out of order or incorrect. It is written in grief. Not just for the sorrow of the bereaved ones of those who died in the crash, and for the airline, but for the pilot himself, who, along with his unaware passengers, was victim of that mystical, unquestioning, almost religious awe and veneration in which our culture has trained us to hold gadgets--any gadget, if it is only complex enough and cryptic enough and costs enough.

I imagine that even after the first failure to hold the glide-path, certainly after the second one, his instinct--the seat of his pants, call it what you will--after that many hours in the air, told him that something was wrong. And his seniority as a four-engine over-water captain probably told him where the trouble was. But he dared not accept that knowledge and act on it. He dared not flout and affront, even with his own life too at stake, our cultural postulate of the infallibility of machines, instruments, gadgets. I grieve for him, for that moment's victims. We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical [gadget] superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject to failure but doomed to it.

GERMANS ALONE MUST NOT NEGOTIATE WITH REDS

KONRAD ADENAUER, Chancellor of the West German Federal Republic, in FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

WE are especially well acquainted with Soviet aims and with the methods by which they are attained. This knowledge has been dearly paid for with the suffering of millions of human beings. For that reason the Germans are convinced that an attempt by Germany alone and apart from the other free nations to solve the problem of German reunification would end with the complete loss of freedom for all Germany. I believe that the only concrete possibility of bringing about the relaxation of the conflict in Europe, and thus of achieving German reunification, lies in an attempt by the Western European Union and the Atlantic Community, acting jointly, to seek a solution of the pending problems with the Soviet Union.

VIET MINH GAINING SUPPORT BY DECEIT

Columnist JOSEPH ALSOP, after a visit into the Communist Viet Minh territory of Indo-China: NO single experience has had such impact as three days with the Viet Minh. In the area I visited the Communists have scored a whole series of political, organizational, military and--one has to say it--moral triumphs. The thing that impressed me most, alas, was the moral fervor they had inspired among the non-Communist Viet Minh cadres, and the stout support they had obtained from the peasantry. Both the mass of peasants and the great numbers of Vietnamese nationalists, political reformers, hopeful idealists and the like firmly believe the Viet Minh Communist leaders when the Communists intone the first of their "three principles"--that the first aim of the state is to serve the people. For the time being indeed, there is good evidence for this belief, and so the great non-Communist majority has been willing and eager to sacrifice and to die for the cause.

Of course, Ho Chi Minh's first principle is no more than a temporary Communist tactic. The first principle will cease to be serving the people; the first principle will become aggrandizing the state, as soon as the Viet Minh have attained full power in Indo-China, and have therefore ceased to depend upon popular support. The men who so much impressed me will not be happy when the change is made from serving the people to aggrandizing the state. But when they learn they have been hideously tricked, it will be too late. If Communist organization and Communist deceit can produce in Asia the kind of result I saw, then the danger in Asia is even more acute than the worst pessimists among us have been accustomed to think.

TROUBLES OF FRANCE CAUSED BY PRESS

French Economist ALFRED SAUVY in the pro-Mendes-France weekly L'EXPRESS : INFORMATION has become the traditional symbol of liberty. It is by the dispersion of this power and not by its concentration that society seeks equilibrium. If information in France were anarchic, disorganized, the evil would be only half as bad. But more and more it is systematized and concentrated. The development of the corporative press [tied to business and political groups] is dividing Frenchmen into blind and hostile groups. Because of it, every Frenchman believes he is a victim; he has no taste for the role of martyr without a crown, and he finds himself driven to rebellion. It is a tragic struggle between blind men who cannot see, of deaf men who cannot hear.

From all this mass of incoherence, there finally results political power. After a big defeat, a man of authority arises: collapse of the franc: Poincare; Munich: Paul Reynaud; Sedan and its sequel: De Gaulle; Dienbienphu: Mendes-France. But, anxious to return to her playthings, France signs up these men only for the time strictly necessary for the restoration of order. The key to the prison where we all are is not found in the texts of political constitutions; it is in the power of information. Without proper information, the sovereignty of the people is only a linguistic convenience.

FAITH IN SOCIALISM DYING IN EUROPE

Columnist WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN in the right-wing biweekly FREEMAN :

ONE brings back from Europe, the native continent of socialism, two contrasted impressions. Parties with the socialist or labor label are in political control of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and are strong partners in coalition governments in Belgium and The Netherlands. The Labor Party is Her Majesty's Opposition in Great Britain, and its chances of coming into power are about fifty-fifty. The Social Democrats are the strongest single party in opposition to Chancellor Adenauer. But socialism as a secular faith, possessed of a set of infallible principles capable of curing all the ills of the economic order, has hit an intellectual low point.

For the first time since the Communist Manifesto, one cannot find in Germany one first-rate mind at the service of Marx's dogmas. In England, the more thoughtful Socialists are re-examining their theories and tactics in a "What went wrong?" spirit. Nationalization of coal mines and railways did not create the new heaven and new earth that had been expected; there has been quite as much discontent as in privately owned industries.

In Europe one sees, behind an imposing fac,ade of socialist voting strength, symptoms of doubt, confusion and intellectual decay. So far as Karl Marx is remembered at all, there is a growing realization that, far from being an infallible prophet, history has proved him a pretentious humbug, dismally wrong in some of his most fundamental dogmas.

* For other views of the crash, see SCIENCE.

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