Pondering the Problems

"This is the American way of doing things--to expect to solve all the world's problems in four days," complained Sulak Sivaraksa, editor of Bangkok's Social Science Review. Crumped U.S. Economist Carl Kaysen: "Everyone wants to talk and no one wants to listen." The occasion for their disgrunllement was a four-day meeting last week in Princeton of some 90 inter national intellectuals assembled for a look at "The U.S.--Its Problems, Impact and Image in the World." The conferees, naturally enough, were dismayed by the problems themselves, but perhaps even more so by the impossibility of getting a roomful of intellectuals to agree on what to do about them.

The conference was sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom, based in Paris and funded largely by the Ford Foundation. At a cost of about $80,000, the I.A.C.F. gave the incoming Nixon Administration a searching set of speculations about the state of the U.S. today and where it is heading. France's Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, journalist and author of the bestselling The American Challenge, voiced a note of urgency in opening the conference. "America, as the leading industrial power, is the crucial battlefield," he said. "The crisis you are living through we will have to face in the future." Some of the matters discussed:

sbTHE RACES. The nation's racial problems "are now hampering its clear vision in dealing with the rest of the world," contended Writer Harold Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual). Black Power, said Cruse, is a necessary step on the way to eventual integration; the Negro must develop his own identity before he can successfully join U.S. society as an equal. Cruse described Black Power as "a belated attempt to get an economic and political share of the American pie," but insisted that it is uniquely American and unrelated to European theories of class struggle. Although most participants denounced the idea of black separatism--John Oakes, editor of the New York Times editorial page, called it "impractical, unreal and immoral"--CORE Director Roy Innis unflinchingly defended it.

sbUNIVERSITIES. Sociologist Daniel Bell argued that today "the source of power comes from theoretical knowledge--and, as this is the case, the university will replace the corporation as the main source of innovation and direction. The university is the gatekeeper of society." If that is true, said Poland's Jan Kott, a professor of comparative literature, the U.S. university is not ready for the task. "After a year at Berkeley," he explained, "I think the university is a green zone of escape, not a real place in a real world. Two days after the takeover of Nanterre, De Gaulle was tottering, but two months after the takeover of Columbia--nothing. This green zone has to become more involved."

sbSOCIAL ORDER. Existing institutions, predicted Pierre Emmanuel, I.A.C.F.'s director, "will be less and less adequate to cope with the repressed energies below the surface or right in the middle of each of us. Americans will have to re discover suffering as something which must have a meaning in the overall process of change. I think that man will need to go further in the direction of chaos, that the 20th century is not over yet, and that we must get used to a life with a high contrast between organization and disruption. It is not a very pleasant perspective." But, he added, it is necessary if change is to come about. Norwegian Scholar Lars Roar Langslet found encouragement in his assumption that "a profound selfcriticism" has become a primary concern for Americans. "Self-confidence has given way to self-consciousness," said Langslet. "This may be experienced by Americans as a sign of distress, perhaps even of nihilism. I regard it as a sign of hope."

sbWORLD ROLE. Alastair Buchan, head of London's Institute of Strategic Studies, warned wryly: "If war is too serious to be left to generals, the formulation, negotiation and implementation of foreign policy is too serious to be left to intellectuals."

With some dissent from Asian participants, there was general agreement that in the future exercise of its global role, the U.S. should rely less on direct, military means--the notion popularly known as "no more Viet Nams." Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann argued that the U.S. "must move from being a global power to having a global impact." Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski called for "selective disengagement," while observing that there is no way the U.S. can totally retreat from its commitment in world affairs. "Even the most brilliant indictments of U.S. policy," he added, "cannot erase the fact that the United States has become the only power that thinks in global terms and actively seeks constructive worldwide arrangements."

Praising the U.S. for reacting with "wisdom and restraint" to setbacks in Viet Nam, Servan-Schreiber maintained that "the best thing for the future that has happened is perhaps the failure of military power in Viet Nam." He added that the U.S. military presence in Europe was no longer needed, and most of the participants agreed. That presence, said Stanley Hoffmann, "reinforces dependency. In effect, this perpetuates the satellite position of Western Europe."

sbTHE FUTURE. Though generally pessimistic, George Kennan, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, found one possibility for hope. Said Kennan: "Millions of people are in a mood, if my senses do not deceive me, to welcome a general movement of national unity; to see the decorum of our life restored; to see the frowns replaced with smiles; to mingle their efforts with those of other people, instead of jeering and screaming at other people; to feel the pulse of returning confidence in themselves, in our value as a nation, in the possibilities of our future. The right spirit and quality of leadership would certainly achieve it. The new Administration must be given a fair opportunity to show what it can do." Harvard Political Sociologist Martin Peretz argued that "the imperative to think and work for change remains compelling," but blamed liberals for underestimating the resilience of American society. He also accused intellectuals of scanting current cruelties and injustices. Said he: "Much of what is being thought and written by intellectuals concerned with future change serves largely to obscure large aspects of the content of the present."

One of the conference's more un usual figures was Dr. Eugen Loebl, a Czech economist and former director of the Czechoslovak State Bank who now in exile. He was an urgent advocate of the reforms that brought on Soviet repression last August. Loebl attacked the U.S. New Left for thinking that overthrowing the capitalist system of private property leads to overnight social reform. "The form of ownership is only one factor," he said. In Czechoslovakia, "we changed the form of ownership and got all the negative results of capitalism--and very few of the positive." He spoke of the irony of the Soviet invasion: "The expropriators expropriated the expropriators." He also paid tribute to his hosts by saying that intellect, rather than arms or money, is America's "greatest weapon."

At the end, Sam Brown, 25, student coordinator of Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, denounced the conference as a failure.

It was too coolly intellectual, he complained, and lacked the passion that his own generation brings to social questions. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. rejoined: "I have never been to a conference which I would call a success." But, he told Brown, "I can imagine nothing worse for our society than the rejection of reasoned analysis by the young."

Eloquent and candid, Schlesinger went on: "Who would wish to defend in -tellectuals? They are often vulnerable, vain and corruptible. We all know that. But ideas are another matter. If we scorn and repudiate the use of reason, we reduce our chance of meeting any of our problems and abandon our society to those most skilled and ruthless in the use of force."

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