The Usefulness of Obsolescent Ideas

By Edwin Warner

... And what there is to conquer... has already been

discovered

Once or twice or several times ...

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost ,

And found and lost again and again.

--T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

--Jorge Luis Borges, The Fearful Sphere of Pascal

This appears to be a time when Americans are running out of new ideas--and perhaps not a moment too soon. Many of these ideas have not worked out very well. In the tooth-and-claw combat of the intellectual arena, they have been found rather scrawny and undernourished, much like the bulls that are being served up in Spanish rings these days. At the moment of truth, they have fallen short--and so have some of the ambitious social programs built on them. It is no surprise, then, that certain seemingly obsolescent ideas, long ago discarded and (some thought) buried forever, are making a comeback and looking fresher than ever in their second incarnation. Or is it their third or fourth or...?

EDUCATION ISN'T EVERYTHING. That was the way Americans put it through most of their--intermittently anti-intellectual --history. You could learn the three Rs in school, but precious little about life in the rough. In the past two or three decades, that philosophy changed as billions of dollars of federal funds were pumped into education with the aim of eliminating a variety of social ills: poverty, criminality, class distinctions. But the massive effort by no means achieved the lofty goals. In his controversial new book, Inequality, Psychologist Christopher Jencks argues that education is only one of many factors--and by no means the most important --in bringing about social change. Sounding something like the antieducationists of old, Sociologist James Coleman recommends that students spend a part of their learning years in outside jobs. They would not be so segregated from the rest of society, and they would pick up experience of life that they miss in the classroom. Increasingly, colleges are offering students the opportunity to interrupt their studies to take temporary jobs.

ISOLATIONISM BECOMES SEMI-RESPECTABLE. When Attorney John Wilson, who represented John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman at the Watergate hearings, called himself a "little American," he was not necessarily being insulting. These days, many Americans prefer that reduced image to the earlier strutting one. Isolationism is no longer a dirty word, as it was two decades ago, though it is not yet an altogether respectable one. John Kennedy's stirring inaugural pledge: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty," seems to belong to another world.

THE ECONOMY ESCAPES FROM ECONOMISTS. Adam Smith cautioned against tampering with the "invisible hand": the myriad acts of buying and selling that maintain the equilibrium of a free economy. In recent Keynesian years, economists have boldly tried to fine-tune the economy with their own hands. For a while in the 1960s, their experiments seemed to work wonders. Steady growth was achieved without intolerable inflation. Subsequently, their hands began to falter as they clearly lost control. With a modesty not previously associated with their profession, economists admit that, in the words of Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, "The rules of economics are not working quite the way they used to." Until they learn what causes the modern economy to act as it does, they have decided that the wisest policy may be to meddle less with it--as Adam Smith advised.

GENES ARE DESTINY. Not in many years has a respectable academician dared to say that man's fate lay in his stars or his genes. Social ills were attributed to the environment; change that and you change man. While the environment has been changing, man, apparently, has not. So renewed attention is being paid to genes. A number of iconoclasts, including Psychologists Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein, argue that intelligence is largely inherited and cannot be significantly improved by family, schooling or any other environmental factor. A furious debate is now raging over this assault on egalitarianism. Blacks in particular are upset because they feel that their lower IQ scores, as a group, are the result of discrimination and deprivation.

THE MERIT SYSTEM EARNS DEMERITS. To banish discrimination, progressive thinkers attacked the quotas that restricted the admission of minority groups to colleges and jobs. Eventually, merit systems, based on objective testing, replaced the quotas. Equal opportunity was supposedly assured for all. But equal opportunity did not lead necessarily to equal success. As some groups lagged behind in the competition, people began to discern a "white middle-class bias" in the testing. Where to turn next? To quotas, of course, as the doubtful means to assure minority access to colleges and jobs.

ETHNICITY IS IN. In contrast to the Old World behavior of their parents, first-generation Americans tried to shed their ethnic identity and join the melting pot. Now, with Americanism under something of a cloud, people are rediscovering their ethnic roots and returning to native dress and behavior. Buttons proclaim: KISS ME, I'M POLISH, HUNGARIAN POWER and ESKIMO POWER. Richard Nixon has boasted of his trace of Irish ancestry, and George Wallace allows as how he has Jewish in-laws. Practically nobody tries to pass for a WASP any more.

EVIL RETURNS. The devil, it can be reliably reported, is alive and well. He no longer appears in his ancient theological raiment; he is more subtly lodged in the human personality--a seventh circle of the psyche--where he is currently known as the instinct of aggression. Such is the description he has been given by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who argue that fundamental drives are the basis of human behavior. In the '60s, it was commonly supposed that the devil could be banished by improving human institutions, but he seems scarcely daunted by such superficial change.

The older ideas that are re-emerging are perhaps less comforting than the more optimistic ones they replace. Their revival casts some doubt on the popular notion that Americans must constantly change their ideas like their clothing. People may be suffering a severe case of future shock, but the reason may be not that they are unprepared for the future but that they tend to forget the past. So much that seems to happen for the first time has, in fact, happened many times before. Thus the temptation of the '60s was to think, overoptimistically, that good intentions could solve any problem; the overly pessimistic tendency of the '70s may be to believe that few solutions are available. To lose one's way and find it again is as American as humble pie. . Edwin Warner

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