Contagion 11

WHAT IS THE HUMAN MIND?
ETHIOPIA
CREATING A 'BROKER STATE'
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)
Periodicals I Boob
I don't have a future." in the U.S. are less than half what they were
With tears streaming down her face, a 13- from 1957 to 1967.
year-old girl made this bleak assessment to 1 The amount of unhealthy sulfur dioxide
her father. To back up her pessimism, she in the air has been steadily declining since
had brought home from school a mimeo- 1970.
graphed sheet listing the horrors that 1The bacteria level in the Hudson River
awaited her generation in the next 25 years: declined by more than 30 percent between
Worldwide famine, overpopulation, air pol- 1966 and 1980.
lution so bad that everyone would wear a Textbooks, Professor London finds, my-
gas mask, befouled rivers and streams that thologize nature as eternally benign until
would mandate cleansing tablets in drinking disturbed by man. It's a rare schoolbook that
water.. . a greenhouse effect that would melt talks about volcanoes belching radiation into
the polar ice caps and devastate U.S.coastal the air, floods that overwhelm river towns,
cities.. . a cancer epidemic brought on by and tornadoes that lift people into oblivion.
damage to the ozone layer. Moreover, textbooks hardly mention the
Moved by the girl's misery, her father, promise of a bright future already on the
Herbert I. London of the Hudson Institute horizon-when average life expectancy
and New York University, wrote a book, Why may approach 90 years, when products
Are They Lying to Our Children? The book derived from recombinant DNA research
documents how some of the myths of the will eliminate most viral diseases, when
1960s and 1970s-and some much older we will enjoy greater leisure, and mate-
than that-are being perpetuated and taught rials-especially plastics-will be better,
as gospel truth in some of our schools. And stronger, and safer.
the book raises a question in our minds: Will Professor London's conclusion-with
the next generation have any better under- which we heartily agree-is that we should
standing of science and technology-both help our children think for themselves and
their merits and their problems-than our reach balanced conclusions. Let's look at
own? their textbooks, not to censor them but to
Professor London's book is not a plea for raise questions. Let's give them different
unbridled technology. But it is a plea for points of view and help discuss them. That
balance. And school textbooks, he believes, way we can educate a new generation of
are notoriously unbalanced. In dealing with citizens who aren't scared by science, and
environmental questions, for example, no who won't be swayed by old mythologies.
textbook the professor could find made any Our youngsters have a future. We, and
mention of the following facts: theschools, should help them look forward to
1 Total automobile emissions of hydrocar- itwith hope, even as they prepare todeal with
bons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide its problems.
Women of Fair Hope
Paul M. Gaston
Women $Fair Hope follows the dreams and achievements of
three extraordinary women whose individual desires to
create a fairer, more equitable society led them, at the turn
of the century, to play important roles in the life of the
utopian community of Fairhope. $13.50
Henry James and the Problem of

Robert Browning
Ross Posnock
A departure from the formalistic concerns of most writing
on Henry James, Ross Posnock's study traces James's
troubled admiration for Robert Browning, a poet whose
mastery of both literature and women profoundly shook the
young novelist's belief that the creation of great art required
sexual renunciation. $24.00
The French Enlightenment

in America
Essays on the Times of
the Founding Fathers
Paul Merrill Spurlin
Paul Merrill Spurlin traces the crucial impact of French
thought on the creation of the American nation. "A defini-
tive synthesis. . . . It is well-written throughout, never
pompous or pedantic, and spiced with lively anecdotes,
thumbnail portraits, and striking quotationsx-Lester G.
Crocker. $20.00
The Poet and the City

A Study in Urban Perspectives
John H. Johnston
Tracing the gradual intrusion of human activity into po-
etry's pastoral, John H. Johnston examines the intersection
of the poetic imagination with the stimulating, often discor-
dant textures of urban life as seen in the works of such
writers as Charles Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams, and
W. H. Auden. $25.00
Athens, Georgia 30602 \

Thirty years after the arms race was launched, people want some answers. Will a
lot of missiles keep the peace or start a war?
News stories like this are complex.That's why you should watch The MacNeilILehrer
NewsHour every weeknight. News stories get the time they deserve. The time you
deserve. You get more facts. You hear different sides. Most important, you get the
analysis you need to understand the issues behind the stories.
Major funding for The MacNeilILehrer NewsHour is provided by AT&T, the national
corporate underwriter.
Weeknights on Public TV
THE
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QUARTERLY
Editor's Comment
PERIODICALS
Research Reports
THE MIND
Is This Cat Necessary?
by Richard M . Restak
Reinventing Psychology
by Robert J. Stemberg
Thinking Machines
by Robert Wright
Background Books
IDEAS
The Broker State
ETHIOPIA
by Paul B. Henze
Background Books
CURRENT BOOKS
REFLECTIONS
The Death and Life of Samuel Johnson
by Lawrence Lipking
Commentary
Biennial Index
1~~~-0363-3276 VOLUME VIII NUMBER 5

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Cover: Details from pages 49 and 106. U S H 346-670 VOL. VIII NO. 5
e Interferon Crusade Options for Tax
Sandra Panem Joseph A. Pechman, editor
The technical innovations of the Public opinion polls indicate that
1970s known as geneticengineering the income tax, once regarded as
revolutionized biomedical research the fairest tax, is now the least popu-
and development. Interferon, a lar in the federal system. The idea of
family of antiviral proteins that tax reform to simplify the federal
many envisioned as an anticancer income tax has gained momentum
drug, became the demonstration from the explosion of the federal
project of this new biotechnology. deficit and the resulting need to in-
In this volume, Sandra Panem uses crease federal revenue. In this Dia-
the development of interferon as a logue on Public Policy, tax experts
case study to examine the interplay examine the current debateover tax
of the technological, political, and policy and provide a detailedevalu-
cultural issues raised by the bio - ation of various tax reform pro-
technology revolution. posals.
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provide the missing theory and ern- viet economic performance, and
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POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 11 RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 30

FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE 15 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 31
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POLITICS & GOVE ENT
"When Money Talks, Is It Democracy?"

Elections on the b y Mark Green, in The Nation (Sept. 15,
1984), P.O. Box 1953, Marion, Ohio 43305.
Since 1974, political action committees (PACs) funded by business,

labor, and single-interest groups have multiplied like rabbits. But after
early public alarm over the prospect of such committees "buying" elec-
tions, a pro-PAC backlash set in. PACs, it was said, are not really so bad.
Green, president of the Democracy Project, a Washington advocacy
group, contends that the critics were right.
PAC defenders point out that such groups contribute less than 25 per-
cent of all the money spent in House and Senate election campaigns
-or just $83 million in the 1982 elections. True, says Green, but "PAC
money, like snow in the mountains, gathers at the peaks." Committee
chairmen and other powerful senators and representatives rake in the
most cash (the House Appropriations Committee chairman collected 75
percent of his 1982 contributions from PACs), and incumbents fare
much better than challengers (43 percent of the money in the 1982 cam-
paign treasuries of the incumbent legislators came from PACs).
Green rejects the notion that most PAC donations (average amount:
$600) are not large enough to make a difference. He notes that there are
plenty of committees that give the maximum: $5,000 for the candidate's
primary campaign, $5,000 for his general election campaign. Most politi-
cians would find such a sum "memorable," Green says.
Can a member of Congress be swayed by a few thousand dollars?
Green quotes Representative Tom Downey (D.-N.Y.): "You can't buy a
Congressman for $5,000, but you can buy his vote." On issues of no
great concern to constituents (e.g., whether to subsidize the widget in-
dustry), a generous campaign contribution may make a difference. As
for the argument that PAC donations are not inducements to future
votes but mere "rewards" for a prior record, Green asks: "Then why do
so many PACs cross-examine candidates . . . about their positions on
pending matters?"
Some PAC apologists maintain that donors often stand on opposite
sides of issues and thus cancel each other out. But which PACs represent
The Wilson QuarterlyIWi~~ter

1984
11
PERIODICALS
POLITICS & GOVERNMENT
To PACs, party labels tend to matter less than incumbency. In the 1982 House elec-
tions, 67 percent o f PAC money went to incumbent congressmen.
the poor, the unemployed, the ordinary consumer? None, says Green.
And while business PACs sometimes split over such issues as protection-
ism versus free trade, Green suggests that agreement is far more com-
mon: "Did any steel company lobby for a stronger Clean Air Act?"
As Representative Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) has observed, Green
writes, "Politicians are the only people we allow to take thousands of
dollars from perfect strangers and not expect it to influence their judg-
ment." Rather than cling to such delusions, he argues, Americans
should demand federal financing of election campaigns.
"The New Jurisprudence" by Gary L. Mc-

A New Legal Theory Dowell, in The Journal of Contemporary
Studies (Summer 1984), Institute for Con-
For the 1980s? temporary Studies, Department 7284,
785 Market St., Suite 750, San Francisco,
Calif. 94103.
The Supreme Court, by most accounts, is moving Right. But even as the
Court steps one way, the philosophical ground beneath it is shifting
elsewhere, argues McDowell, a Tulane University political scientist.
In the nation's top law schools and in important outposts in the fed-
The Wilson Quarterly/Winter 1984

12
PERIODICALS
era1 appeals and district courts, a new legal philosophy (or jurispru-
dence) has taken hold. Called "public law litigation," it was inspired by
the Warren Court's (1953-69) judicial activism. Notable advocates in-
clude Harvard's Abram Chayes and Oxford's Ronald Dworkin. "The
new constitutional theorizing is not aimed at the explication of the the-
oretical foundations of the Constitution," writes McDowell, "it is typi-
cally aimed a t creating new theories of constitutionalism that are . . .
superimposed on the Constitution."
Traditionally, American judges distinguished between social evils and
constitutional violations. "Laws may be unjust, may be unwise, may be
dangerous, may be destructive and yet not be . . . unconstitutional," de-
clared delegate James Wilson during the Federal Convention of 1787. Pub-
lic law jurisprudence emphasizes that federal judges must concern
themselves not just with constitutional rights, but also with constitutional
values. The constitutional protection against "cruel and unusual punish-
ment" is thus broadened to include conditions, such as poor sanitation in
prisons, that offend human sensibilities.
Judges once confined themselves in most cases to ruling on the mat-
ter at hand. Now, writes McDowell, "the resolution of abstract legal or
constitutional issues is very often the [court's] primary objective and
the resolution of a particular dispute between individuals merely a by-
product." The traditional view was that rights were "limitations
against governmental power for the protection of the individual; the
new jurisprudence understands rights to be entitlements that the indi-
vidual is owed by the government."
Moreover, public law advocates favor "prospective" rather than "his-
torical" judgments, that is, judicial rulings that do not merely rectify
past wrongs, but also impose systemic reform to prevent a recurrence.
Such decisions have in some cases made local public schools and state
mental health care programs the wards of federal courts.
As Alexander Hamilton wrote, all the rights and privileges of the Con-
stitution "would amount to nothing" without the protection of courts.
McDowell adds, though, that the Constitution will one day amount to
nothing if it is not protected from the courts.
"Why the Sagebrush Revolt Burned Out"

Elegy for the by Robert H. Nelson, in Regulation (May-
June 1984), American Enterprise Insti-
Sagebrush tute, 1150 17th S t . N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036-9964.
Remember the Sagebrush Rebellion? During the late 1970s, Western

governors and legislators, backed by ranchers, miners, and farmers, de-
manded that Washington hand over large tracts of federally owned
land to the states. Today, the Sagebrush country is so quiet you can
hear the wind whistle across it.
Despite its reputation as a haven of rugged individualism, the mod-
ern American West is the region "most dependent on the federal gov-
ernment," observes Nelson, a U.S. Department of the Interior
The Wilson QuarterlyWinter 1984

13
PERIODICALS
economist. Uncle Sam owns half of the West's land, including 86 per-
cent of Nevada and 47 percent of California. Federal largess built the
dams, aqueducts, and superhighways that sustain the West. In return
for Washington's dollars, the Western states tacitly consented to fed-
eral control over much of what went on within their borders.
But this arrangement began to fray during the late 1970s. The 1976
Federal Land Policy and Management Act and other new Washington
legislation-backed by environmentalists and by Eastern and Mid-
western industrialists and labor unions aggrieved over "disproportion-
ate" subsidies to the West-angered Westerners by limiting grazing,
logging, and mining on public lands and by restricting the availability
of cheap water and electric power. Such restrictions threatened to snuff
out a regional economic boom.
To many Westerners, Washington's subsidies seemed to bring more
trouble than they were worth. In 1979, Nevada's state legislators kicked
things off by passing the "Sagebrush Rebellion Act," which "flatly de-
clared the public domain lands in Nevada to be the property of the
state" (a claim that has no prospect of legal recognition). Within a year,
Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming passed similar laws.
Almost before the ink was dry on these laws, the states began to have
second thoughts. Maintaining federal lands could cost a state up to $25
million annually. Miners and ranchers realized that the states would
not continue Washington's practice of leasing them land a t below-
market rates. Finally, the Reagan administration appeased the Sage-
brushers. Some 360,000 acres of federally owned Western land have
passed into state hands since 1981-a tiny fraction of all federal lands,
but an important token.
But the chief explanation for the Sagebrush Rebellion's early demise,
Nelson believes, is that it lacked an intellectual rationale that could ex-
plain why state ownership was worth the increased price and would
"serve the broad national interest."
"From Analyst to Negotiator: The OMB's

A Bureaucratic New Role" by Bruce E. Johnson, in Jour-
nal of Policy Analysis and Management
Identity Crisis (Summer 1984), Subscription Dept., John
Wiley and Sons, 605 Third Ave., New
York, N.Y. 10158.
Top flight, important, but dull. That was the reputation of the White
House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before Bert Lance
and David Stockman came along. Today, the agency has more glamour,
but it also faces an identity crisis of sorts.
Traditionally, the OMB has ridden herd on the federal bureaucracy
on the president's behalf, pruning and shaping agency budgets into the
unified federal budget submitted by the White House to Congress every
January. Staffed by career civil servants and led by only a few political
appointees, the agency was noted for its "neutral competence," writes
Johnson, an OMB staff member from 1977 to 1982. In recent years,
The Wilson QuarterlyIWinter 1984

14
PERIODICALS
however, OMB officials have spent more and more time on Capitol Hill,
trying to push the president's budget through Congress-and thus
more timi in the news.
The change stems partly from Congress's overhaul of its own
budget procedures. The Congressional Budget Impoundment and
Control Act of 1974, for example, compelled the OMB to report to
Congress frequently. It also created House and Senate budget com-
mittees and a Congressional Budget Office, all of which naturally
developed ties to the OMB.
But the biggest change came after Ronald Reagan's election. Con-
vinced that federal bureaucrats would resist deep budget cuts, Reagan
gave his OMB director, David Stockman, increased authority within the
executive branch. Stockman's four years as a Congressman schooled him
in the ways of Capitol Hill and made him a valuable White House
lobbyist there. The result, says Johnson, was an unprecedented central-
ization of power in OMB's hands-enough, he adds, to undercut the
"iron triangles" of congressional subcommittees, federal agencies, and
interest groups that had long shaped the budget-making process.
Today, the OMB faces a conflict "between its new role as 'packager'
and 'seller' of the budget and its traditional role as overseer of the bu-
reaucracy," according to Johnson. As senior OMB officials spend more
time lobbying for the White House on Capitol Hill, they have less time
to do their homework. The result: "Staff members are less able to brief
the president accurately about . . . programs and to [draft] well-
conceived proposals for him." This is the price of OMB's broader pow-
ers. Johnson suggests that there is no turning back now; Washington
needs a centralized budget authority. Even after Stockman departs,
OMB is likely to be home to more forceful political operatives and
fewer flinty-eyed accountants.
OLICY & DEFENSE
"How to Understand Central America"

Understanding by Mark Falcoff, in Commentary (Sept.
1984), 165 East 56th St., New York, N.Y.
Central America 10022.
Americans' misperceptions of Central America are numerous. Among

them is the notion that the region's seven nations are all economically
stagnant "banana republics," and that this is the cause of their political
and economic woes.
In fact, writes Falcoff, a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
"between 1950 and 1978, the Central American republics registered a
5.3 percent annual rate of economic growth, during which time real in-
come per capita doubled, exports diversified, and there was a signifi-
cant growth in manufacturing." Between 1960 and 1977, the literacy
rate jumped from 44 to 77 percent of the population, and the number of
The Wilson QuarterlyIWinier 1984

15
PERIODICALS
FOREIGN POLICY & DEFENSE
doctors per capita doubled.

The region's political volatility springs from "the conflict between
economic growth and outdated social structures." Amid rising popular
expectations, political oligarchies have refused to give way, and pov-
erty and inequality have persisted-42 percent of the region's people
remained in "extreme poverty" as of 1981. Political upheaval was vir-
tually inevitable.
The turmoil is greatest in El Salvador. In 1979, a coalition of Center-
Left politicians joined reform-minded army officers who had deposed
dictator Carlos Humberto Romero and governed the nation briefly be-
fore right-wing military men regained power. The experience led to El
Salvador's Center-Left split. Part of the group followed Dr. Guillermo
Ungo into a n uncomfortable alliance with the Marxist Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The others stuck with Jose
Napoleon Duarte, who was elected president in May.
Duarte's relations with El Salvador's military and with the
United States are a t best awkward, adds Falcoff. The El Salvadoran
president, a Christian Democrat, "cherishes fundamentally precapi-
talist notions of property, and favors the use of state power to reduce
social and economic inequalities. His views on that subject, by no
means extreme by Latin American standards, would shock most
American conservatives."
For Washington policy-makers, the question is this: How can the
Center-Left be put back together again? The Reagan administration's
"scenario calls for some unwieldy pieces to fall neatly into place," ob-
serves Falcoff. With the help of U.S. military and economic aid, Presi-
dent Duarte must simultaneously tame the army, appease the 45
percent of the electorate that last May voted for Roberto DJAubuisson's
far-Right ARENA Party, pursue economic and human-rights reform,
and beat the guerrillas.
Some U.S. critics of the Reagan administration favor a negotiated settle-
ment that would bring the FMLN guerrillas into the government without
elections. But Falcoff maintains that in such a "power-sharing" arrange-
ment, the Marxists would soon squeeze out the centrists, just as their San-
dinista allies did in Nicaragua after the overthrow of dictator Anastazio
Somoza in 1979. Reagan may be asking a lot of Duarte, Falcoff concludes,
but he would be asking even more if he expected moderates to survive in a
government that included Marxists.
"The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins

Revisiting the of the First World War" by Stephen Van
Evera, in International Security (Summer
'Accidental' 1984), The MIT Press (Journals), 28 Carle-
ton St., Cambridge, Mass. 02142.
World War I is often called the "accidental war." It is seen as the culmi-
nation of a "grab bag of misfortunes" opened by the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian extremist
on June 28,1914. Van Evera, a Harvard analyst, contends that what ap-
PERIODICALS
Belgium was the first victim of the kaiser's armies, even though it was Russia's mo-
bilization that had alarmed the Germans. The Germans feared defeat if the Allies
were allowed to seize the initiative.
pear to be accidents and blunders were the result of a "cult of the offen-
sive" that reigned in European military and political circles of the day.
Early in the 20th century, advances in military technology-the in-
vention of the machine gun, barbed wire, and rapid-firing rifles-gave
defenders a decisive tactical advantage over attackers in war. But mili-
tary thinkers totally misread these developments, Van Evera writes.
Instead, a "cult of the offensive" swept Europe. French president
Clement Fallieres expressed a typical view: "The offensive alone is
suited to the temperament of French soldiers. . . . We are deter-
mined to march straight against the enemy without hesitation."
Victory, it was held, would go to the bold and the swift. Wars would
be short and decisive-a "brief storm," as German chancellor Beth-
mann Hollweg put it.
The cult of the offensive made the costs of aggression seem low to
expansion-minded powers, such as Germany and Austria-Hungary, and
thus made conquest all the more tempting. Van Evera adds that the se-
cret entangling alliances that are often blamed for the war's outbreak

17
PERIODICALS
were not so much the problem as the fact that the alliances were uncon-
ditional rather than defensive in design. Britain and France were
dragged into the war even though their ally, Tsar Nicholas 11, had mo-
bilized his armed forces and thus provoked the Germans into calling up
their reserves and firing the first shots.
Militarily, the cult of the offensive led commanders to make at-
tacking first (and preemptively) the cardinal rule in any future conflict.
Tsar Nicholas I1 was advised by his generals in July 1914 that no plans
even existed for partial, defensive mobilization of the reserves to deter
Austria-Hungary from making further threats against Serbia. Russia
was forced to muster its forces against Germany as well. In Berlin, the
offensive mentality reinforced fears that the Russian bear, if not struck
first, would overwhelm Germany. As a result, Germany declared war
on Russia on August 1, and general war soon broke out.
Van Evera believes that if Europe's leaders had understood the
power of the defense-and foreseen the protracted trench warfare that
claimed the lives of eight million combatants-"the Austro-Serbian
conflict would have been a minor and soon forgotten disturbance on
the periphery of European politics."
"Ultra: Some Thoughts on Its Impact on

Reassessing the the Second World War" by Williamson
Murray, in Air University & v i e w (July-
'Ultra Secret Aug. 1984), Superintendent of Docu-
ments, Government Printing Office,
Washington, D.C. 20402.
Thanks to William Stevenson's A M a n Called Intrepid (1976) and other

popular books, one of the best kept secrets of World War I1 is now a part
of popular lore. In addition to making a good yarn, writes Ohio State
University historian Murray, the Ultra secret offers some sobering les-
sons about military intelligence.
The story begins during the 1930s, when the Polish secret service
managed to build a copy of the German military's encoding device,
called the "Enigma machine." Before Hitler's 1939 blitzkrieg, the Poles
passed a replica along to the British. To conceal the fact that they had
access to top secret German military communications, the British and
Americans created the Ultra system, which fed the information to a few
top commanders through a communications network that lay entirely
outside of normal intelligence channels.
Possession of the Enigma replica did not guarantee the Allies a steady
stream of information: The Germans switched codes frequently, and it
was often impossible to find the corresponding settings on the device.
Even when information was available, the Allies did not always make
proper use of it. In December 1944, for example, Enigma intercepts
showed that German forces were massing for a counterattack against
the invading Allied armies in Belgium. But the Allied high command,
convinced that "the war was virtually over and the Germans could not
The Wilson Quarterlflinter 1984

18
PERIODICALS
possibly launch an offensive," Murray says, disregarded the warnings

and suffered heavy losses during the ensuing Battle of the Bulge.
Such blunders were "the exception rather than the rule," notes Mur-
ray. Ultra yielded precious information to the Allies: It aided in cor-
nering the marauding battleship Bismarck in 1941, revealed that
General Erwin Rommel's feared Afrika Korps was not as numerically
strong as British commanders in North Africa had believed, and
showed that air bombardments of German synthetic fuel plants were
gradually crippling the Nazi war machine, which led the Allies to in-
crease their air attacks. When British cryptologists managed to break
the Enigma codes used by Admiral Karl Donitz's U-boats in the North
Atlantic, the results were dramatic. Because Allied merchant convoys
were able to pinpoint and avoid the roving U-boat "wolf packs," ship
losses dropped from 61 in June 1941 to 22 in July and stayed low.
Ultra's ultimate value to the Allies is difficult to assess, Gabriel
argues. In fact, the clearest lesson emerges from the German side. Hit-
ler's generals, aware that their moves were frequently anticipated, re-
fused to believe that their codes could have been broken and insisted
that there was a traitor in their midst. To underestimate one's enemies,
Murray concludes, is the most fatal of mistakes.
"When Policy Outstrips Power-Ameri-

ore can Strategy and Statecraft" by Eliot A.
Cohen, in The Public Interest (Spring
Than 1984), 20th & Northampton Sts., Easton,
Pa. 18042.
Since World War 11, U.S. policy-makers have struggled to bring Ameri-
can military capabilities into line with an ever-growing list of global re-
sponsibilities. Harvard political scientist Cohen contends that they
have been less than successful.
In 1960, near the zenith of its global influence, the United States
counted 2.5 million men in uniform, with a trained reserve of nearly
four million. Since then, Washington has shouldered additional over-
seas burdens, pledging, for example, to defend Central America and the
Persian Gulf. Yet, U.S. armed forces today number 2.1 million (some
500,000 stationed abroad), reserves just two million. Even more signifi-
cant, in Cohen's view, is the spread of Soviet power, especially through
"proxies" such as Cuba, Syria, and Vietnam. Moreover, the diffusion of
advanced military technology now makes even third-rate regimes
troublesome foes.
Twenty-five years ago, Cohen notes, Henry Kissinger declared that
"we lack a strategic doctrine and a coherent military policy." The prob-
lem is even more severe today. The Pentagon's plans, for example, call
for a rapid redeployment of existing units to cover contingencies. But,
for both technical and political reasons, such mobility is not always
feasible. As Cohen points out, "an army schooled and equipped for Eu-
ropean warfare is not well-suited for jungle warfare, and vice versa."

19
PERIODICALS
And the political strings attached to U.S. troops stationed in foreign

countries can be hard to break. When President Jimmy Carter tried to
withdraw army units from South Korea, political uproar forced him to
cancel his decision.
Cohen believes that drastic reductions in U.S. forces overseas are nei-
ther necessary nor possible. Few U.S. allies have shown the will or abil-
ity to pick up the slack. But the Reagan administration's
across-the-board increases in the defense budget (to $227 billion in
1984) are not the answer either.
Painful choices await U S . leaders, warns Cohen. They must decide,
for example, whether the defense of Western Europe will remain the
U.S. armed forces' chief overseas mission and whether to strive for uni-
lateral capabilities (versus relying more heavily on allies for military
support). In sum, they must decide what "foreign policy commitments
[the United States] has the resources and will to make good on."
ECONOMICS, LABOR, & BUSINESS
"On the Consequences of Muddling

Ending the Latin through the Debt Crisis" by Rudiger
Dornbusch, in The World Economy (June
Debt Crisis 1984), Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd, 108
Cowley Rd., Oxford OX4 lJF, United
Kingdom.
In August 1982, Mexico declared itself unable to pay its foreign debts,
and in quick succession, Brazil and several other Third World countries
followed suit. Wall Street and Washington were shaken; the over-
extended international banking system would be acutely threatened if
any single debtor nation actually defaulted.
As Dornbusch, an MIT economist, notes, "muddling through" by all
parties-stretched out repayments, emergency loans, and austerity
rules laid down by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a condi-
tion for help to the debtors-saved the day. "Debt does not get paid,"
observed a senior Mexican official, "Debt gets rolled [over]."
Dornbusch sees serious difficulties ahead. He focuses on five Latin
countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela) that, as of
mid-1983, owed $191.5 billion to overseas creditors, including $83 bil-
lion to U .S. banks.
Washington's big-budget-deficit, high-interest-rate policies make it
costlier for Latin debtors to borrow foreign money to pay interest on
existing loans. Washington, unlike the governments of Western Europe,
still does not insist that big banks maintain "appropriate loan-loss re-
serves" to cover the risks of foreign loans, and hence leaves the world
banking system vulnerable to a domino effect default. Washington,
anxious to protect some domestic industries, has frowned on subsi-
dized Latin exports of steel, copper, textiles, shoes, et cetera to the

20
PERIODICALS
ECONOMICS. LABOR, & BUSINESS
United States, even though export revenues are the chief means the
Latin countries have to meet their financial obligations.
Dornbusch also scolds the IMF for forcing the debtor nations to adopt
austerity programs that, by slashing government spending and im-
ports, look good on paper but diminish long-term prospects for eco-
nomic growth.
"Muddling through" will not suffice during the next phase of the debt
crisis. Dornbusch warns. U.S. officials should 1) lower barriers to Latin
imports; 2) get U S . banks to write off some Latin debt in return for
agreements by South American leaders to devalue national currencies
in order to promote exports. That would leave the Latin nations poorer
"but with employment and hope."
"The Japanese Manager Meets the Ameri-

can Worker" i n Business Week (Aug. 20,
1984), Box 421, Heightstown, N.J. 08520.
Last year, Japan's Bridgestone Corporation bought a failing Firestone

Tire and Rubber Company factory in LaVergne, Tennessee, and, to no-
body's surprise, put it on the road to profitability. What is surprising,
reports Business Week, is that Bridgestone, like other Japanese compa-
nies in America, is doing things the old-fashioned way.
Bridgestone is just one of 31 Japanese manufacturers that estab-
lished an American foothold in 1983. Japanese companies now own 479
American business executives tour a Japanese factory. Some Japanese management

"secrets" were originally borrowed from the United States.
The Wllson QiiarlerlyIIVinter 1984

21
PERIODICALS
plants in the United States, employing some 73,000 workers.

The company's recipe for the LaVergne plant is light on cheerleading
and group calisthenics, heavy on the basics: "tighter quality standards,
new equipment, and a stricter management approach." Bridgestone
met union wage demands but also won concessions on work rules (e.g.,
top production jobs are now assigned on the basis of worker merit, not
seniority). It has retrained American managers-most of them hold-
overs from the Firestone days-in basic business techniques, such as
measuring statistically their own progress toward meeting company
goals. One result: Output per worker is up from 17 tires per day to 28.
But Japanese-style management does not automatically bring bliss
to the American workplace. At Sanyo Manufacturing Corporation's
television and microwave-oven plant in Forrest City, Arkansas, workers
complain of production-line speedups. Employee grievances are
mounting at Sharp Manufacturing Company's Memphis, Tennessee,
factory, according to union spokesmen, despite worker satisfaction
with participation in the company's "quality circles." Many Japanese
corporations are less than enthusiastic about U.S. labor unions. United
Auto Workers organizers get the cold shoulder at Honda's Marysville,
Ohio, factory and Nissan's Smyrna, Tennessee, assembly plant.
At Bridgestone, president Kazuo Ishikure has achieved mixed results.
Worker distrust lingers from the Firestone era, says Business Week. One
Japanese manager jokes with local union leaders: "We learned lots of
four-letter words from you." Despite gains at the Tennessee plant, labor
productivity still is only half that of the company's Japanese plant.
Profits are still a year away. But Ishikure is confident that once Ameri-
can workers learn "the Bridgestone way of manufacturing," the tire
factory's fortunes will take a turn for the better.
"The Future of American Unionism: A

Big Labor Comparative Perspective" by Everett M.
Kassalow, in The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science
At Europe (May 1984), Sage Publications, 275 South
Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills, Calif. 90212.
Since the end of World War 11, America's labor unions have had their
ups and downs, but their counterparts elsewhere in the industrialized
world consistently fared better. Now, predicts Kassalow, a University
of Wisconsin economist, the foreign advantage is likely to widen.
The U.S. work force has always been less unionized than Western Eu-
rope's. Whereas 29.3 percent of American workers held union cards in
1968,35.8 percent of West German workers, 44 percent of British work-
ers, and 61.2 percent of Danish workers did. By 1979, the unionized por-
tion of the American work force had dropped to 24.9 percent. But
unions by then claimed 39.2 percent of West Germany's work force,
55.8 percent of Great Britain's, and 75.7 percent of Denmark's.
Kassalow believes that American labor unions have suffered because

22
PERIODICALS
they must fight factory-by-factory for new members against sometimes

fierce employer resistance. No such difficulties hamper European labor
unions. By custom (and often by governmental edict), labor unions en-
joy industry-wide recognition. They negotiate not with individual com-
panies but with national employer associations. "There are virtually no
important industries on the continent to which union recognition does
not extend," Kassalow reports.
The fate of U.S. "Big Labor" may well hinge on whether it can win
over workers in the growing service industries, such as banking, insur-
ance, medical care. In Europe, these industries are already unionized.
During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. labor unions
reaped some benefits from the decentralized style of American collec-
tive bargaining. European unions had difficulty cashing in on the
boom because industry-wide bargaining forced them to accept labor
contracts keyed to the least profitable companies. That kept union
wages low: Some European employers during those years "often of-
fered benefits well above the negotiated minimums, in order to re-
cruit a satisfactory work force." U.S. labor unions, by contrast, were
free to demand fat contracts from prosperous firms, skimpier ones
from marginal companies.
Now, decentralization is hurting American unions, hindering ef-
forts to form a united front against employer demands for wage and
fringe benefit "givebacks" and for a national industrial policy to save
jobs in declining industries.
In general, Kassalow writes, economic hard times hurt U.S. labor
unions and their members more than their European counterparts,
while booms bring them greater benefits. But, on both continents, or-
ganized labor's elixir is economic growth, which helps boost member-
ship and wages.
SOCIETY
"Crime Free" by Michael Castleman, in

~eve&g Crime Social Policy (Spring 1984), Room 1212,
33 West 42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
It is hard to imagine a better candidate for a late-night holdup than a

7-Eleven convenience store. Yet while nationwide crime soared dur-
ing the past eight years, the 7,000-store chain enjoyed a 56 percent
drop in armed robberies.
The reason is simple: The 7-Eleven's parent, Southland Corporation,
hired ex-criminal Ray Johnson to tell it how to deter would-be robbers.
Johnson advised the company to move cash registers to the front of its
stores, remove signs from the windows, and install exterior floodlights
-all of which increased the possibility that a holdup would be seen
and reported. He told the company to put the clerk and cash register on
an elevated platform, so that would-be robbers could not see how much

23
PERIODICALS
SOCIETY
To subway riders, graffiti is more

than a nuisance; it is a n assault
on the senses. Experience shows
that quick cleanups of such
spray-paint "art" discourage
further defacement.
money was in the till, and hence know whether their risks would be
well rewarded. As a finishing touch, the company sometimes installs
conspicuous tape measures on the inside of front doors. This alerts
criminals to the fact that clerks are trained to prepare detailed descrip-
tions of them.
The success of the 7-Eleven formula, argues Castleman, an editor of
Medical Self-Care Magazine, shows that "self-help" can be a more effec-
tive crime stopper than either eliminating the "breeding grounds" of
crime or pushing for surer and swifter punishment.
Neighborhood watch groups are another example of effective crime
fighting, he says. As many as five million Americans in 20,000 communi-
ties may be involved in such efforts. Not only do community watch
groups help by reporting crimes to the police quickly, but they also serve
as a signal to undesirables that the community cares and is on guard.
Signs of apathy and neglect are invitations to crime. In a 1969 experi-
ment, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo abandoned
two cars, leaving their hoods up, one in a run-down Bronx, New York,
neighborhood, the other in suburban Palo Alto, California. Within a
day, the Bronx car had been virtually stripped, but the Palo Alto car
went untouched for weeks. Then, Zimbardo took a sledgehammer to it.
Within hours, passers-by reduced it to a wreck. The lesson is borne out

24
PERIODICALS
SOCIETY
in everyday experience: Quick repair of vandalized street lights and

careful design of public facilities can reduce the appearance of neglect
and thus minimize damage.
Fighting crime, Castleman argues, is at least as much a matter of re-
fusing to give criminals opportunities as it is of getting more cops on
the street and tougher judges on the bench.
"The Adultlike Child and the Childlike

Adult: Socialization in a n Electronic
6 ~ ~ i society?
- k ~
Age" by Joshua Meyrowitz, in Daedalus
(Summer 1984), American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, P.O. Box 515, Canton,
Mass. 0202 1.
Until recently, middle-class American children and adults lived in two

different worlds, each with its distinct sphere of knowledge, language,
behavior, and dress. Through their control over playmates, books, and
conversation, parents and schoolteachers shaped what youngsters
knew about life's "nastier realities."
No longer. "Childhood as a protected and sheltered period of life has
all but disappeared," observes Meyrowitz, a University of New Hamp-
shire professor of communication.
Not only do children today speak, act, and dress more and more like
adults; many younger adults, reared on TV, act and dress "like over-
grown children." Designer jeans, shorts and sneakers, T-shirts: These
are now standard-issue clothing in a developing "uni-age" society.
Adults and children alike use profanity; youngsters address their elders
by their first names. In the courts, new "children's rights" are being
carved out; on television, child actors (e.g., Gary Coleman) "play the
roles of adult characters who are imprisoned in children's bodies."
Why the change? In some measure, Meyrowitz suggests, America's
shift from a "book culture" to a "television culture" is responsible.
Parents once controlled what crossed the thresholds of their homes,
but TV opens an entirely new "doorway" which is, as a practical mat-
ter, largely beyond their ability to control. (American children aged
two to five average 25 to 32 hours of TV-viewing weekly.) In sound and
colored pictures, the young see adults behaving not in ways that their
parents may extol, but engaged in lying, cheating, adultery, mayhem.
Problems that were excluded from the world of the young-birth con-
trol, abortion, alcoholism, suicide-have made a forced entry.
In addition to expanding children's knowledge of the wider world,
TV takes them "backstage" in their own homes, revealing the anxieties
and fears of adulthood that parents usually try to conceal. Once chil-
dren become aware that the cool, calm self-possession of their parents
is sometimes "staged," they may become "more unwilling to accept all
that adults do or say at face value." That may also help explain the
childlike behavior of so many young adults, Meyrowitz speculates.
When there is nothing left to "hide from the kids," there is less reason
not to act like a kid.
The Wilson Qii(irlerfvlWii11er1984

25
PERIODICALS
SOCIETY
"The Job Market for College Graduates,

1960-90" by Russell W. Rumberger, in
The Journal o f Higher Education (July-
Go to College? Aug. 1984), Ohio State University Press,
1050 Carmack Rd., Columbus, Ohio
43210.
"It doesn't pay to go to college anymore" is a charge heard frequently

since the late 1970s. Not true, writes Rumberger, a Stanford University
researcher, although there are reasons to believe that a college degree
earned today is not "worth" what it was 20 years ago.
In 1960, he notes, new graduates of four-year colleges earned 65 per-
cent more than counterparts who had only high school diplomas. That
advantage declined to 58 percent by 1980, a small loss considering the
massive changes that swept the U.S. economy and higher education
during the two decades.
College enrollment jumped from 3.8 million in 1960 to 8.5 million in
1970 and then to 12.1 million in 1980. During the same 20-year period,
the number of college-educated people in the work force tripled. By
1980, about 20 percent of all U.S. workers were college graduates.
The American economy was also creating new jobs rapidly during
the 1960s and 1970s. Total employment grew from 63 million in 1960 to
96 million in 1980. About 36 percent of the jobs created during the
1960s were professional or managerial; during the 1970s, that figure
grew to 45 percent. But Rumberger estimates that such high-level jobs
will account for only 28 percent of the employment growth between
1980 and 1990. One reason: a continuing slowdown in the growth of
government, a key source of white-collar jobs.
In retrospect, he writes, the 1960s were a "golden era" for the college
educated. College graduates were in short supply even as the demand for
highly qualified workers mushroomed. In 1960, only two-thirds of all col-
lege graduates held professional or managerial jobs; by 1970, three-
quarters did. According to Rumberger, the economy may well produce
enough jobs to go around, but not necessarily enough high-paying white-
collar jobs. In that respect, the 1980s will be a lot like the 1950s.
PRESS & TELEVISION
"What Do Ombudsmen Do?" by Cassan-

Journalist, dra Tate, in The Columbia Journalism Re-
view (May-June 1984), 200 Alton Place,
eal Thyself Marion. Ohio 43306.
In 1967, amid growing public pressure for greater press accountability,

A. H. Raskin of the New York Times was among the first to propose that
newspapers appoint ombudsmen "armed with authority to get some-
thing done" about reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness.
The Wilson QuarterlylWinter 1984

26
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
That same year, Louisville's Courier-Journal and Times became the first
papers to heed the advice.
Today, 36 of the nation's 1,701 dailies employ ombudsmen, including
the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. Tate, a freelance writer,
argues that it is no tragedy that the idea never really caught on.
In theory, the chief value of an ombudsman is that he can objectively
analyze the shortcomings of editors and reporters. The ombudsman
"prevents editors from sweeping anything under the rug," insists
Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee. Richard Cun-
ningham, former ombudsman at the Minneapolis Tribune, agrees. Edi-
tors, he says, have "automatic defenses" that allow them to brush off
readers' complaints as the work of cranks and crackpots.
But journalists are far from unanimous about the virtues of ombuds-
manship. Former St. Petersburg Times executive editor Robert Haiman,
for example, calls it a "sham." He maintains that ombudsmen actually
isolate editors by acting as a buffer between them and readers. James
Gannon of the Des Moines Register adds that only top editors have
enough authority to keep newsmen on their toes.
Not all of today's ombudsmen write columns in their newspapers
(eight work strictly behind the scenes), and, according to Tate, few of
those who do write say very much that is important. Too often, she con-
tends, columns explore such "cosmic" questions as the relative merits
of "Peanuts" as opposed to "Li'l Abner" or why newspaper ink comes
off on readers' hands.
In the end, Tate agrees with former Washington Post ombudsman
Ben H. Bagdikian, who suggests rather glumly that having ombudsmen
is "better than nothing."
"Foreign Policy on Deadline" by Lloyd N.

'S Influence On Cutler, in Foreign Policy (Fall 19841, P.O.
Box 984, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
Lawyer Lloyd N. Cutler was already a shrewd Washington political

"insider" when President Jimmy Carter asked him to become the White
House counsel in 1979; but, he declares, "It came as a distinct surprise
to me how much television news had intruded" into White House
decision-making.
TV news, in Cutler's view, puts extraordinary pressure on the presi-
dent to respond immediately to ominous overseas events. If the White
House announces no action by the late afternoon TV-news deadline,
"the evening news [correspondents] may report that the president's
advisers are divided, that the president cannot make up his mind, or
that while the president hesitates, his political opponents know ex-
actly what to do."
Cutler blames this "TV doomsday clock" for President Carter's hasty
August 1979 declaration that the presence of a Soviet army brigade in
Cuba was "not acceptable." It turned out, however, that the Russian
troops had been in Cuba since 1962. U.S. intelligence agencies had sim-

27
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
ply lost track of them when their attention shifted elsewhere during the
Vietnam era: The "discovery" was a rediscovery. Had the false alarm
appeared only in print and not on TV, Cutler argues, "the Carter ad-
ministration might have been able to delay its response at least a few
days," the time it took U.S. intelligence to remedy its absent-
mindedness. But the incident damaged Carter's credibility and hurt
chances for Senate passage of the then-pending SALT I1 treaty.
TV news also affects the substance of foreign policy decisions. Writes
Cutler: "The ugliness of military combat or economic deprivation can
be graphically conveyed [but] the complex policy considerations that
usually lie behind a decision to risk these consequences are much more
difficult to explain."
By the same token, the "constant drumbeat of TV news" hampered
Carter administration attempts to win the release of the American dip-
lomats held hostage in Iran through "quiet diplomacy."
Two-thirds of all Americans report that TV news is their chief source of
information, adds Cutler. That means that whatever is on the tube is also
on the minds of White House policy-makers, distracting their attention
from problems that are often more important. Cutler is not optimistic
about taming the TV tiger, but he believes that rewarding superior TV
reporting (perhaps with the equivalent of TV Pulitzer Prizes) and expos-
ing shoddy TV journalism might eventually make a difference.
"The Great Debate: Roosevelt, the Media,

and the Coming of the War, 1940-1941 "
by Richard W. Steele, in The Journal of
American History (June 1984), Organiza-
tion of American Historians, 112 North
The News Bryan St., Bloomington, Ind. 47401.
America's major news media are frequently criticized nowadays for

their "adversarial" stance toward government. Yet 45 years ago, as
Franklin Delano Roosevelt edged the nation toward war, the broadcast
and film industries were virtual propaganda arms of the Roosevelt ad-
ministration.
To FDR, "the issue of war and peace was far too important a subject
for debate," argues Steele, a San Diego State University historian.
Nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, with Hitler on the march, the
Roosevelt administration began to try to mobilize a reluctant nation
for World War 11. Realizing that Americans would no longer accept the
flagrant propaganda techniques used during World War I, White House
aides Stephen Early and Lowell Mellett inaugurated a new, more sub-
tle approach: flooding radio, newspapers, and newsreel producers with
seemingly neutral news and information that reflected the administra-
tions viewpoint.
Two new agencies, the Office of Government Reports and the Divi-
sion of Information of the Office of Emergency Management, relent-
lessly cranked out newsreels and press releases. The result, Steele says,
was a "dull, steady, pervasive drum of preparedness information ema-

28
PERIODICALS
PRESS & TELEVISION
The first "Great Communicator"? FDR addresses the nation in July 1940, after his
nomination for an unprecedented third term in office. The Democratic Party plat-
form that year contained a stem antiwarplank.
nating from every popular source of public education."

"In almost every instance," he continues, "the nation's newspapers,
radio stations, and movie-makers willingly contributed to the effort as
a public service." Hollywood moguls were first on the bandwagon, in
no small part because the success of Warner Brothers' Confessions of a
Nazi Spy (1939) demonstrated that propaganda could pay. Top Warner
Brothers, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives offered
their services directly to the White House.
Government officials were not above using carrots and sticks to
achieve their ends. Newsreel companies, for example, were forced to
cultivate official favor to ensure that their bulky equipment and lights
would be accommodated at public occasions. The radio networks, con-
fronting the threat of tighter regulation by the Federal Communica-
tions Commission, were even more compliant. Steele asserts that CBS's
Boake Carter, the last major isolationist, anti-administration radio
commentator, lost his job in 1938 as a result of White House pressure.
The nation's newspapers proved the least malleable of the mass me-
dia. They were too numerous and too heterogeneous in outlook to fall
easily into line, though many gladly used government press releases as
filler. Still, isolationist views got only limited attention; national de-
bate on defense issues was thus diminished. In December 1941, con-
tends Steele, "a great many Americans remained uncertain of the
circumstances (beyond the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) that led
them into global conflict."

29
PERIODICALS
RELIGION & P
"Bribery" by Michael Philips, in Ethics

hat Is (July 1984), University of Chicago Press,
Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chi-
Bribery? cago, 111.60637.
Suppose a policeman stops you for speeding, and you fold a $20 bill
around your driver's license before handing it over. Also suppose he takes
it and lets you drive off with only a warning. Is that bribery? The answer
is not so obvious, according to Philips, of Portland State University.
The American public, easily angered by malfeasance in government
and business, often fails to make crucial moral distinctions. Suppose
Senator Smith, always friendly to farmers, accepts a pair of box seats
a t a Washington Redskins game from the Rutabaga Growers Associa-
tion. Has he been bribed? Consider a more complicated case: In the
ante-bellum South, a slave owner pays a slave to "throw" a plantation
boxing match on which he has a bet. In Philips's view, what the master
offers is a bribe, what the slave accepts is not.
Philips says that bribery has three characteristics: The recipient ac-
cepts a payment to act on behalf of another; the recipient's actions vio-
late a law or unwritten understanding; and the violation harms the
interests of those who depend on the recipient or his office. What mat-
ters most is whether there is an agreement, explicit or implicit, be-
tween the two parties.
In the slave owner's case, the money offered is a bribe because he has
violated an unwritten understanding with other slave owners. But the
slave is guiltless because he has no stake in the morally corrupt system.
Senator Smith is in the clear because he has made no agreements.
Sometimes, what passes for bribery is actually extortion. Extortion
occurs when an individual demands to be paid merely to do his duty. As
American businessmen overseas have discovered, entering the lowest
bid on a project may not be enough: Somebody's palm must be greased.
Bribery? No, although paying an extortionist is not necessarily free of
moral taint. But that, says Philips, is another matter.
"Thoreau and Anarchism" by Myron Si-

noreau's mon, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Sum-
mer 1984), The University of Michigan,
Darker Side 3032 Rackham Bldg., Ann Arbor, Mich.
48109.
In his own day, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was known as a poet, a
mystical nature writer, and a minor moralist of the American "tran-
scendentalist" school. Many of his peers viewed him as a crank and
misanthrope. Today, however, Thoreau is popularly regarded as a
champion of the community of man, an architect of the strategy of non-
violent resistance to the state, and a moral precursor to Mahatma Gan-

30
PERIODICALS
RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
dhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Simon, who teaches English at the University of California, Irvine, says
that Thoreau himself would have been startled by his new image.
Thoreau's contemporaries surely would have been. They knew Tho-
reau as a troubled, terminally dyspeptic soul, a lifelong bachelor and
curmudgeon. Robert Louis Stevenson dismissed him as a near-hermit
devoid of sympathy for others; James Russell Lowell wrote that he was
selfish andconceited.
Thoreau's rehabilitation in America began with the publication in
1931 of Henry Seidel Canby's Classic Americans, which hailed the Wal-
den recluse as "an individualist citizen of the universe." Today, writes
Simon, he is seen as an "introspective, ethereal bachelor of nature
spurred to social activism by the State's murderous amorality."
But unlike the anarchist thinkers he is often compared to, Thoreau
held both government and the governed in contempt. They believed in
the liberated man's ability to build what the 18th-century British an-
archist William Godwin called "a well-conceived society without gov-
ernment." Thoreau's view: "What men call social virtues, good
fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close
together to keep each other warm."
Nor did Thoreau have much use for political activism: "That which
interests . . . any large number of men is always something trivial, as
politics." Thoreau was an incisive critic of American society, Simon
concludes, but his uncompromising insistence that government and
men adhere solely to "higher" laws of conscience deprived his writings
of any practical political import.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
"Solving the Mathematical Riddle of

aking Sense Chaos" by James Gleick, in The New York
Out of Chaos Times Magazine (June 10, 1984), 229 West
43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.
Scientists have no choice but to assume that the natural world operates
predictably, according to immutable laws. But they would be the first
to admit that this is not always so, that chaos creeps into some corners
of nature. Now, reports Gleick, a New York Times editor, a few scientists
suspect that thereis a method even in nature's apparent madness.
Slowly emerging is a fledgling discipline called simply "chaos." Its
father is Cornell physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Although his theoreti-
cal work is extremely esoteric, it can be thought of as a quest to explain
commonplace phenomena: Why does the steady pitter-patter of a drip-
ping faucet become erratic? Why does rising cigarette smoke in a still
room suddenly break into wild swirls?
In the mid-1970s, Feigenbaum began tinkering with a series of mathe-
The Wilson Quarterly W i n t e r 1984

PERIODICALS
matical equations that produced orderly strings of numbers that gradu-

ally gave way to disorderly ones. He noticed that certain patterns began
to emerge in the breakdown. Describing them in mathematical terms
consistently produced certain numbers-now known as "Feigenbaum
numbers." The physicist even discovered a new universal constant (like
pi): 4.669201609 . . . , which expresses how rapidly all systems undergo
something called "period doubling" on their way to chaos.
Although Feigenbaum could not a t first get his work published in
professional journals, word spread quickly along the scientific grape-
vine. Gradually, it became apparent that Feigenbaum had ap-
proached in a general way what researchers in other fields were
exploring in particular cases. For example, Feigenbaum's discoveries
coincided with MIT meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz's work on what
is sometimes fancifully called "the Butterfly Effectn-how "a butter-
fly flapping its wings today in Peking might affect the weather next
month in New York," or, in other words, how a tiny variation in a sys-
tem can produce chaos.
As it turns out, the Feigenbaum numbers do seem to be universal.
Their existence, Gleick writes, shows that "of all the possible paths to
disorder, nature favors just a few."
It is too soon to tell whether Feigenbaum's findings will have any
practical applications. It could be that they will help scientists under-
stand manifestations of chaos such as earthquakes, economic trends,
and the sometimes deadly fibrillation of the human heart. Today, that
possibility is real enough to have awakened the interest of people as
various as Pentagon analysts and Wall Street stockbrokers.
"The Underside of Computer Literacy"

The Fallacy of by Douglas Noble, in Raritan (Spring
1984),165 College Ave., New Brunswick,
Computer Literacy N,J. 0890i.
"A computer in every classroom and a floppy disk in every book bag"
could well be America's slogan for the 1980s. But Noble, a schoolteacher
and former computer programmer, thinks that today's fad for "computer
literacy" in the public schools and elsewhere is pure hokum.
True, he says, computers will be everywhere before long: One esti-
mate is that there will be 80 million computers in use in the United
States by the end of the century. But "literacy" in computer languages
(e.g., BASIC, FORTRAN) and the ability to program will be no more
needed to operate a computer than a knowledge of auto mechanics is
needed to drive a car-especially as the new devices become more and
more "user friendly."
Behind the push for computer literacy is the notion that it will be a
prerequisite in the job market of the future. But it is absurd to believe
that the mere presence of a computer "will transform the skills re-
quired and radically raise the level of intellect needed" in most jobs,
Noble contends. Far from requiring greater skills, Noble fears, comput-
The Wilson Quaiter/?/11~inter1984

32
PERIODICALS
erization will strip many jobs-especially clerical ones-of any re-

maining opportunities for human creativity. Whatever computer skills
will be needed, he adds, will be easily acquired on the job. In 1990,
there will be well over 100 million Americans at work, and only about
two million of them will be in true computer occupations (e.g., pro-
grammers and systems analysts).
A computer literate citizenry is also often cited as the best defense
against the triumph of Big Brotherism, Noble observes. But only the
most sophisticated programmers can prevent computerized invasion of
privacy. And knowing BASIC is beside the point. It would not give ordi-
nary Americans any greater political voice in determining what role
computers will play in U.S. society.
Computer literacy has nearly "created its own necessity," as it be-
comes a requirement for jobs in which it will never be used. Dazzled by
the technology and afraid of being left behind, Noble says, too many
Americans fail to recognize a pernicious fad for what it is.
''High-Tech Ceramics" by Howard J. San-

Futuristic ders, Chemical and Engineering News
(July 9 , 1984), American Chemical Soci-
Ceramics ety, 1155 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20036.
Ceramics is a pleasant hobby, a nice way to make personalized gifts

such as ashtrays, coffee cups, and vases. Ceramics is also a rapidly ex-
panding $4-billion high-technology industry, reports Chemical and E n -
gineering News's Sanders.
The heat-resistant tiles layered on the skin of the space shuttle Chal-
lenger are made of "high-tech" ceramics, as are some artificial human
heart valves and a variety of electronic devices. High-tech ceramics
may help make the Pentagon's long-planned Stealth bomber invisible
to radar. Obviously, these are no ordinary ceramics. They have names
such as silicon carbide and cubic boron nitride. They are valued be-
cause of their extreme resistance to heat, their strength (diamonds are
ceramics), and their peculiar electrical properties. Their chief draw-
back is the same as that of a homemade coffee cup: brittleness.
Ceramics, high-tech or low-tech, are made by subjecting a base mate-
rial (such as clay) to extreme heat or pressure. Scientists are now work-
ing to find ways to reduce brittleness in the high-tech ceramics,
manufactured by pressing or heating superfine powders. The researchers
are focusing on purifying the powders and making the particles ex-
tremely small and regular in shape so that they fit tightly together. Also
under study are new ways of mixing ceramic fibers with other materials.
The chief impetus behind much of this work is the prospect of devel-
oping ceramic gas turbine automobile engines to replace today's
metal piston ones. Because ceramics can withstand higher tempera-
tures than even the most advanced metal alloys, engines built mostly
of ceramic parts could run hotter than their conventional counter-
parts, thereby burning fuel more efficiently and leaving fewer pollut-
The Wilson Quarter/~~/IVinter

1984
33
PERIODICALS
ants. And because ceramics weigh only 40 percent as much as alloys,

ceramic engines would be doubly thrifty on gasoline. Detroit prob-
ably will not have a road-worthy ceramic engine until the 1990s, San-
ders reports, but Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (whose cars are
sold in the United States under the Chrysler name) promises to field
one in three to four years.
Today, most ceramics are used in electronics-as insulators and in
integrated circuits and capacitors (which temporarily store electric
charges). But ceramics research is still young, Sanders notes. As ceram-
ics replace more and more metals and plastics, a "Ceramics Age" may
not be far off.
"The Ultimate Head Waiter: How the

Brain Controls Diet" by Richard J. Wurt-
man, in Technology Review (July 1984),
P.O. Box 978, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
The human body's production of the chemical messengers that govern

its internal affairs is largely unaffected by what nutrients are avail-
able. However, recent evidence suggests that some foods do trigger
the release of such messages, according to Wurtman, a medical re-
searcher at MIT.
Along with other researchers, he has conducted experiments with
serotonin, a "neurotransmitter" that carries messages between nerve
SEE? I F W SUST WAIT

EAT THOSE COOKIE5, BUT IT OUT, THE UROE TO EAT
THE URGE PflSSeO, DIOM'T
IT, CATW ? An American obsession:
"Cathy," of comic strip fame,
has another go at dieting.
In fact, doctors have little knowl-
edge about how to shed
weight permanently.
UR6E TO Efft THOSE AN0 ATE 3 DONUT5.
The Wilson Quurlerlv/Winler 1984

34
PERIODICALS
cells. From experiments with rats, he found that a diet rich in carbohy-
drates boosts the amount of serotonin in the blood. What message does
serotonin "transmit"? In another experiment, Wurtman fed rats high-
carbohydrate "snacks" and gave them a choice at mealtimes between
high- and low-carbohydrate foods. Almost invariably, the rats chose the
latter, as if they "knew" that they already had consumed plenty of car-
bohydrates.
Similar effects have been found by research doctors in humans. Sero-
tonin, Wurtman says, "provides the brain with telltale information on
the body's nutritional state. This information then helps the brain de-
cide what and when to eat next, and whether to be sleepy or responsive
to the environment."
About half of all obese people are "carbohydrate cravers," and Wurt-
man believes that most of them suffer from a short circuit somewhere
in their serotonin-producing systems. Indeed, the drug d-fenfluramine,
which stimulates serotonin production, sharply reduces snacking by
carbohydrate cravers (whose cravings, oddly, seem to strike in each
case at a certain time of day). But because such cravings are satisfied as
fully by a 250-calorie bagel as by a 1,000-calorie ice-cream sundae, sim-
ply substituting less fattening carbohydrate sources may be the best
weight-reduction strategy for these people.
Serotonin may also play a role in other forms of obesity. The neuro-
transmitter produces a feeling of relaxation and sleepiness, which sug-
gests that some big carbohydrate consumers may in fact be
"self-medicating" against the effects of anxiety or depression.
The obese are not the only people who may profit from the new in-
sights into the diet-brain connection. Some research suggests, for ex-
ample, that Alzheimer's disease, a disorder that afflicts five percent of
Americans under age 65 and whose symptoms resemble senility, may
be related to a shortage of the amino acid called choline. Choline, avail-
able from certain foods, is an essential element in the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine.
"Floods, Fires, and Famine: Is El Nina to

Understanding Blame?" by Michael H. Glantz, in Ocea-
El Nino nus (Summer 1984), Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.
02543.
An increase in shark attacks off the coast of Oregon. Drought in Sri

Lanka. Windfall profits for Brazilian soybean farmers. What do these
three phenomena have in common? All were cited in 1982 and 1983 as
indirect effects of El Nina ("The Child").
El Nino is a complex meteorological phenomenon that occurs
The Wilson QuarierlyIWimer 1984

35
PERIODICALS
RESOURCES & ENVIRONMENT
when, for reasons that are still unclear, the ocean surface off Peru
a n d elsewhere in the southern Pacific warms up, touching off a
series of dramatic wind and weather shifts. The global importance
of El Nifio only recently began to dawn on meteorologists, though its
existence has been noted by ship captains and Peruvian fishermen
for centuries, reports Glantz, a National Center for Atmospheric Re-
search scientist.
After El Nifio recurred during 1972-73, scientists began putting to-
gether a picture of its worldwide effects. Some were obvious. Global
food production dropped in 1972 for the first time since the late 1940s.
El Nifio's abnormally warm waters altered wind and barometric pres-
sure patterns on a massive scale, producing droughts in Africa, Austra-
lia, Central America, and the Soviet Union. Some effects were subtle:
Soviet crop failures prompted Moscow's massive grain purchases from
the United States during the early 1970s, which temporarily furthered
East-West detente.
The 1982-83 El Nifio was "one of the most extreme on record," notes
Glantz. It was also the first that scientists monitored as it was happen-
ing, allowing them to study more closely its "teleconnections," or link-
ages to other meteorological events.
El Nifio appears at irregular intervals-notable occurrences were in
1891, 1925, 1934-41, and 1965-with different characteristics and ef-
fects each time. The 1982-83 El Nifio, for example, was accompanied
by heavy rains and storms in California, while earlier ones brought
drought to the state. On the East Coast of the United States, the
1982-83 episode made for a much warmer winter than usual.
But Glantz adds a word of caution. Nearly every burst of strange
weather everywhere on the globe during those two years was laid to El
Nifio. In fact, however, meteorologists are far from knowing for sure
when bad weather results from El Nifio and when mere coincidence
brings the two together. And forecasts based on faulty guesses about
such linkages, he says, are "worse than no forecast at all."
ARTS & LETTERS
"Young Jazz Musicians" b y Gary Gid-

A Rebirth of h z z ? d i n s , in Grand Street (Summer 19841, 50
Riverside Dr., New York, N.Y. 10024.
Jazz in America is on the verge of a renaissance. Sadly, very few Ameri-

cans are aware of it, writes Giddins, music critic for New York's weekly
Village Voice.
Jazz moves in cycles, he notes. "Brief bursts of innovation alternate
with longer stretches of consolidation." Inevitably, the public prefers
the more accessible music from the more conservative eras. Louis Arm-
strong's innovative "hot" jazz of the 1920s was followed by commer-

36
PERIODICALS
cialized swing in the '30s; the bebop played by Charlie "Bird" Parker in
the 1940s gave way to the more digestible "cool" sound in the 1950s;
John Coltrane's avant-garde saxophone work of the 1960s was followed
by popular jazz-rock fusion. If the cycle stays true to form, a new crea-
tive outburst is now due.
Giddins sees "an astonishing array of talent" in jazz today. But, so
far, no leader with the stature of an Armstrong or Coltrane has emerged
to lead a breakthrough. Even so, many of today's jazzmen are virtuosos,
applying the avant-garde musical vocabulary to jazz and blues classics.
Unfortunately, none of these young players-saxophonist David
Murray, pianist Hilton Ruiz, trumpeter Woody Shaw-get much of a
hearing outside of Manhattan. There, a galaxy of nightclubs nourishes a
lively jazz scene. But few promoters or major American record compa-
nies seek out jazz musicians, only a handful of radio stations play their
music, and few of the college campuses that hosted performances by
the Modern Jazz Quartet or Gerry Mulligan during the 1950s exhibit
much interest in such music today.
Ironically, outside of their Manhattan oasis, American jazz musicians
find some of their most enthusiastic audiences overseas. The world's
leading jazz magazine, Swing Journal, is published in Japan, and many
top American jazz players are forced to record for tiny companies in
Germany, Denmark, and Italy.
An exception to the general neglect is the 22-year-old trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis, who recently won Grammy awards for his jazz and
classical recordings. But Giddins is not optimistic about any jazz-
man's prospects for lasting public recognition. He recalls how one
noted critic complained about the absence of prominent composers at
a 1965 White House arts festival, even though a featured performer at
the festival was Duke Ellington. To the critic, as to many Americans,
the jazzman was invisible.
"William Shakespeare and the American

Shakespeare's People: A Study in Cultural Transforma-
tion" by Lawrence W. Levine, in The
American Historical Review (Feb. 1984),
400 A St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.
A young Frenchman attending a performance of one of Shakespeare's

plays in a San Francisco theater in 1851 was astonished when the audi-
ence periodically burst into "shrill whistles and savage yells."
Such crowd reactions were not uncommon in 19th-century America,
writes Levine, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley.
Shakespeare was very much a part of popular culture. In Philadelphia
during the 1810-11 theater season, the curtains rose on 88 perform-
ances, 22 of them Shakespearean plays. In New York City, 10 different
versions of Hamlet were staged during the 1857-58 season. By the turn
of the century, however, Shakespeare's very popularity would cost him
his audience.
Theater audiences during most of the 19th century were "social

37
PERIODICALS
ARTS & LETTERS
microcosms" of the United States, Levine says. The gentry occupied

the boxes, in the "pit" were middle-class patrons, and the gallery
was the preserve of the common people. Shakespeare's plays served
as the centerpiece of programs that included minstrel shows, acro-
bats, a n d other entertainments; and the shows traveled far and
wide. Makeshift stages in Western outposts such as Red Dog, Rattle-
snake, and Hangtown drew some of the best Shakespearean actors
that the East, and even Europe, had to offer. Just about everyone
was familiar with Shakespeare, Levine notes. Countless intentional
parodies, such as Julius Sneezer, attest to that.
Shakespeare was popular for a number of reasons. His plays wore
well in a society that valued oratory, and they lent themselves to melo-
drama. Shakespeare also seemed to be in tune with American moral
sensibilities. The words, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 1
But in ourselves," could just as well be those of Thomas Jefferson as of
Cassius in Julius Caesar.
Yet, after the mid-19th century, "polite" culture gradually claimed
Shakespeare for its own. Among the reasons: The masses of newly ar-
riving immigrants demanded more entertainment that did not have to
be heard to be enjoyed-boxing, burlesque, baseball. But Levine sees
growing class divisions as the chief cause. Middle-class theatergoers
lost their enthusiasm for popular showplaces, such as one in Philadel-
phia where the clientele was given to pelting the performers with rot-
ten fruit and the management felt obliged to warn that "officers are
appointed who will rigidly enforce decorum." So the well-to-do segre-
gated themselves from their uncouth countrymen. And separate audi-
ences, Levine notes, gave rise to separate cultures.
"The Catch in the Late Picasso" by John

Picassos Last Richardson, in The N a v York Review of
Books (July 19, 1984), P.O. Box 940,
Paintings Farmingdale, N.Y. 11737.
During the last decade of his life, Pablo Picasso (188 1-1973) fell from favor
among art critics, and his works from that period are still not well re-
garded. But Picasso's friend and biographer, John Richardson, contends
that they represent "a phenomenal finale to a phenomenal career."
In 1961, Picasso moved to a villa in southern France shortly after his
marriage to Jacqueline Roque, the patient, protective (and much younger)
woman whose presence henceforth dominated his life and work. After the
move, the artist rarely left his immediate neighborhood, but he continued
working vigorously until his death, guarded all the while by his wife. As in
the past, the transformation in Picasso's life was mirrored in his work.
Many of the paintings and prints of this period depict "baleful nudes
flaunting their sexual parts." If some of these nudes and lovers often look
like wrestlers, it is because Picasso "got hooked on Catch," the French ver-
sion of staged television wrestling. Catch also contributed to "the general
air of burlesque violence" in the late works.
The Wilson Quurterlv/Winter 1984

38
PERIODICALS
Picasso's wife, Jacqueline

Roque, was the model for
his 1963 painting, Head
of a Woman.
The "not very sexy" sexuality of these works is seen by many crit-
ics as a pathetic reflection of the artist's own waning sexual powers,
but Richardson argues that Picasso used sex as a metaphor for the
struggle, self-expression, and occasional comedy involved in the
making of art. The vulgarity of what Picasso referred to as his "su-
perreal" women-"hefty, smelly creatures" Richardson calls
themÃ‘i'threatene a generation nurtured on [abstract] art that had
been deodorized and sanitized." In his eighties, Picasso could still
shock even the avant-garde.
To charges that Picasso during these years borrowed from his artistic
predecessors and executed his paintings clumsily, Richardson concedes
nothing. Picasso, sure of his place in the history of art, felt no compunc-
tion about "cannibalizing" past masters, commenting on their work,
and, as in the case of Edgar Degas, even inserting their likenesses into
his own paintings. The seeming clumsiness of the style in these late
works, Richardson insists, is nothing but an attempt to ensure that
technique would not stand in the way of subject.
Often that subject was art. More often it was Jacqueline Roque. Her
presence in Picasso's work during these years is rivaled only by her in-
fluence on his life. For that reason, Richardson says, this last of Picas-
so's great periods should be called l'epoque Jacqueline.
PERIODICALS
OTHER NATIONS
"Japanese Education: How Do They Do

Japan's Effective It?" by Merry I. White, in The Public In-
terest (Summer 1984), 20th & Northamp-
Public Schools ton Sts., Easton, Pa. 18042.
In education, as in business, Americans are studying the "Japanese

edge." If there is a "secret" to Japan's educational success, writes
White, a Harvard sociologist, it is that the Japanese believe even more
than Americans do in the importance of schooling.
The Japanese spare no effort to achieve educational excellence. Their
school year is 60 days longer than the standard American 180-day term,
and homework assignments are staggering by comparison. The far-
reaching social consensus on education has allowed Tokyo to centralize
school administration. Education outlays, amounting to 8.6 percent of
the gross national product (versus 6.8 percent for the United States),
are evenly distributed from community to community. Half of all edu-
cation spending is financed out of national revenues.
Japan's system is best seen up close, says White. Teachers enjoy great
respect. They are hired for life and earn about $2,000 per year more
than other Japanese civil servants, though less than middle-echelon
corporate executives. A teacher's duties extend far beyond the school-
house door: He oversees his students' vacation studies and frequently
visits their homes.
The typical Japanese grade-school classroom is not quite what an
American would expect, White reports. Children jump up and down,
chatter about the teacher's questions, and shout out answers. To the
teacher, White explains, enthusiasm is more important than quiet.
(Japanese teachers spend about 10 percent of their time maintaining
classroom discipline; American, 60 percent.)
But the real secret of Japanese education, White says, can be sum-
marized in one word: "Mom." When children enter elementary
school, their mothers begin parallel classes (called mamajuku) so
that they can help the kids study. Standard equipment for the young
student is an enclosed study desk-complete with built-in light,
shelves, clock, and pencil sharpener-which is, in White's words,
positively "womb-like." A popular accessory: a buzzer to summon
Mom for help or a snack.
Surprisingly, the public schools do little to foster competition.
Rarely is anybody allowed to fail or skip a grade; separate "tracks" for
especially bright or slow students, common in U.S. schools, do not exist
in Japan. But the pressure to perform is intense in the after-school juku,
preparatory courses for college entrance exams. So important are these
tests that some Tokyo hotels provide special last-minute study facili-
ties, complete with "tension-release rooms."
In the heterogeneous United States, such a system would not work,
White concludes. But there is a simple lesson Americans can learn: Total
commitment to schooling by parents and educators pays off.
The Wilson QuarterlyIWimer 1984

40
PERIODICALS
OTHER NATIONS
"Argentina and Democracy" by Edward

Democracy Schumacher, in Foreign Affairs (Summer
1984), P.O. Box 2615, Boulder, Colo.
I n Argentina 8032 1.
In October 1983,Argentinians surprised themselves when they made mod-

erate Raul Alfonsin their president. That historic election marked the end
of a seven-year military dictatorship and, possibly, the long domination of
Argentinian politics by Juan Peron and his followers.
Can Argentina finally shed its 50-year-old reputation as "the bad
boy of the Western Hemisphere"? asks Schumacher, a N e w York
Times correspondent.
The nation has considerable assets. Its people enjoy the third highest
standard of living in the Western Hemisphere (behind the United States
and Canada); "literacy is high, poverty low, and racial divisions hardly
exist." Argentina is the world's third largest grain salesman. But it has
long been plagued by political factionalism and economic woes. During
the past 40 years, 46 cabinet economic ministers have come and gone. In-
flation since 1976 comes to a "mind-boggling" 259,400 percent. The most
frightening statistic of all: Argentina owes $45 billion to foreign banks,
making it the world's third largest debtor, behind Brazil and Mexico.
Alfonsin must solve Argentina's economic crisis if democracy is to sur-
vive. Waiting in the wings is the military, which has unseated six civilian
governments since 1930. Another adversary is the Peronist party, created
by dictator Juan Peron, who ruled from 1946 to 1955, and again from 1973
to his death in 1974. The Peronists are a disparate lot, spanning the ideo-
logical spectrum from Left to Right, but their power base is in the nation's
strong labor unions. Any move by Alfonsin to restrain wages or impose
austerity plays into the hands of his political foes.
The new president has enjoyed some success in wooing the Peronist
faction led by Peron's third wife, Isabel. The forced retirements of half
the nation's admirals and generals strengthened Alfonsin's control over
the military, already shaken by its defeat in the 1982 Falklands War
with Britain. Yet Argentina's domestic economic problems are daunt-
ing, Schumacher notes, and they are compounded by the demands for
sacrifice by overseas creditors and the International Monetary Fund.
Without Washington's financial aid and intercession with Argentina's
impatient creditors, he concludes, Alfonsin's prospects are bleak.
"Sectarian Conflict in Egypt and the Po-

Egypt's Threatened litical Expediency of Religion" by Ha-
mied Ansari, in The Middle East Journal
Christians ,s^a 19841, 1761 N St. N.W., Wash-
ington, D.C. 20036.
Religious strife never seems to be far from the surface in the Middle
East-between Muslims and Christians or Jews, and among Muslims.
In Egypt, a long-standing truce between the Muslim majority and Cop-
tic Christians has been showing signs of strain.
The Wilson Quarterly1 Wittier 1984

41
PERIODICALS
OTHER NATIONS
The first manifestations of the tension began to appear after Egypt's

defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, notes Ansari, a Johns Hopkins
scholar. To counteract what they perceived as the nation's moral drift
and defeatism, Muslim fundamentalists began forming jama'at, frater-
nal groups devoted to traditional Islamic ways. The rise in Muslim re-
ligious fervor aroused uneasiness among the Copts, a Christian sect
numbering in 1976 between 2.3 million (says the government) and
eight million (say the Copts) in a land of 36.6 million. How much room
would there be for a Christian minority in a fundamentalist Muslim
Egypt? The Cairo government long restricted the number of Copt
churches and forbade Copts to proselytize their Muslim countrymen. In
1971, their frustration compounded by anxiety over Islamic fundamen-
talism, the Copts elected a militant pope, Shenouda 111.
Soon thereafter, isolated outbursts of Muslim-Christian violence be-
gan. Ansari argues that Egypt's President Anwar Sadat exacerbated the
strains by exploiting Muslim religious passions for political advantage.
Following a 1980 state visit to the United States marred by the protests
of vocal Copt demonstrators living there, Sadat accused Pope She-
nouda of conspiring to undermine "the Islamic character of the state"
and of aiming to carve out a separate Christian state in Egypt.
St. George's Coptic Church in Cairo. Egypt's Coptic Christian Church was estab-
lished under Roman rule and flourished under the Byzantine emperors. It went into
decline after Arab Muslims invaded the country in A.D. 639.

42
PERIODICALS
OTHER NATIONS
Matters reached a head in June 1981, when Copts and Muslims

clashed in a Cairo slum, and 17 people were left dead. That fall, Sadat
felt obliged to crack down on both Christian and Muslim groups. He ex-
iled Pope Shenouda, broke up militant organizations of both persua-
sions, and began to jail their leaders. To halt the arrests, members of
the extremist Muslim Tanzim al-Jihad group gunned down Sadat on
the sixth of October.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak seems to have learned the lesson
of Sadat's death, Ansari says. He has a broad domestic political coali-
tion and has avoided sectarian rhetoric. But Ansari fears that other
Egyptian politicians may find it harder to resist appealing to Muslim
religious passions to boost their own popularity.
"The Rational Humanitarians" by Hans

Whither Sweden? L. Zetterbera. in Daedalus (Winter 19841.
American cade em^ of Artsand sciences;
P.O. Box 515, Canton, Mass. 02021.
For much of the 20th century, Sweden has served as the world's model
of a welfare state. Now, however, it seems full of dire portents, writes
Zetterberg, who heads the Swedish Institute of Opinion Research.
Sweden's welfare state is very much a reflection of the national char-
acter, he says, a special brew of rationalism and humanitarianism. Ra-
tionalism in the sense that the Swedes like to stick as close to facts as
possible. "Political debate in Sweden deals primarily with technical
questions," Zetterberg says. Swedes tendto be faintly embarrassed by
discussions of values or religious faith.
Swedish rationalism and humanitarianism have become wedded to
an unshakable faith in government that dates back centuries. In part
because they were spared feudal rule and always had a voice in their
government, Zetterberg says, the Swedes never developed deep skepti-
cism about the state. They tend to "regard bureaucracy as reason and,
therefore, justice incarnate."
That belief is a key ingredient in the nation's cradle-to-grave "organ-
ized humanitarianism." Medical and dental care are practically free, and
no tuition is charged for education up to the Ph.D. level. The government
gives newlyweds low-interest loans to set up housekeeping. The system
imposes a heavy burden of taxation, but Zetterberg sees a more perni-
cious flaw. Humanitarianism of this kind, he says, "loses its heart." The
average citizen "begins to believe that his fellows will be taken care of by
the system without any effort on his part." Meanwhile, an overweening
welfare bureaucracy increasingly segregates beneficiaries from everyday
life. "Children are sent to day-nurseries; the unemployed, to retraining
centers; . . . the aged, to old people's homes."
Zetterberg fears that despite its many triumphs, the Swedish welfare
state will produce an enervated citizenry. "Today's nonmilitary high-
tax society is about to give birth to the computerized, controlled one of
tomorrow," he predicts. "We ought to be able to do better."
1984
The Wilson Quarterl~~IWi~~fer
43
Reviews of new research b y public agencies and private institutions
"Beyond Monetarism: Finding the Road to Stable Money."

Basic Books, 10 East 53rd St., New York, N.Y. 10022.270 pp. $16.95.
Author: Marc A. Miles
In August 1971, President Nixon shut ket? In December 1982, Americans

the U.S. gold window, declaring that had $350 billion in their checking ac-
Washington would no longer redeem counts; Eurodollar deposits overseas
foreigners' dollars for gold. Two years totaled $291 billion.
later, Washington pulled out of the Miles also asserts that while mone-
fixed international exchange rate sys- tarists have "burned up a lot of com-
tem established under the 1946 Bret- puter circuits" trying to confirm their
ton Woods Agreement. In October theory, there is no real proof that
1979, Federal Reserve Board Chair- changes in the money supply affect in-
man Paul Volcker announced that the flation, interest rates, and economic
board would adopt "monetarist" growth. It is far more likely that
policy prescriptions. money supply fluctuations are the ef-
All of these events were landmarks fect, rather than the cause, of changes
on the road to disaster, argues Miles, a in these indices.
Rutgers economist and self-described By focusing on the quantity of
"supply-sider." money, Miles continues, the Federal
Today's inflation rate, finally cut to Reserve Board has ignored the most
between four and five percent after a important question Americans ask
deep recession, is still more than dou- about the dollar: How much is it going
ble the average rate during the to be worth in the future?
1946-71 period. And not since the The Federal Reserve, he argues,
mid-19th century have interest rates should concern itself with prices, not
approached the levels of recent years. the money supply. It could do that by
Miles blames monetarism most of buying and selling designated com-
all for the instability of the dollar in modities to ensure that their prices
recent years. Monetarists, led by the stay constant.
University of Chicago's Milton Fried- Many of his supply-side colleagues
man, hold that the key to fighting in- favor a gold commodity standard, but
flation a n d promoting economic Miles favors a "market basket" of
growth is a slow, steady increase in commodity futures (e.g., wheat, pota-
the nation's money supply. But Miles toes) and, to stabilize interest rates,
sees a number of flaws in this view. long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. The
The Federal Reserve Board, he Federal Reserve would set a target
argues, does not really control the rate of, say, five percent interest on the
money supply. Within the United bonds. If rates rose higher, it would
States, its powers are substantial, but sell bonds; if they dropped, it would
the dollar is a global currency. Euro- buy bonds. No effort would be made to
pean banks with dollars in their vaults control the money supply.
escape the Fed's regulation, and they Fixed international exchange rates
can "create" new dollars a t will sim- might be necessary to restore Amer-
ply by making loans denominated in ica's economic health, Miles adds, but
U.S. currency. the first step is to concentrate on
How large is this "Eurodollar" mar- achieving price stability.
The Wilson Quarterly/Winfer 1984

44
RESEARCH REPORTS
"The Reagan Record."

Urban Institute, 2100 M St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037.415 pp. $12.95.
Editors: John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill
During his first four years in office, Coupled with higher Pentagon
Ronald Reagan's chief accomplish- budgets, however, the tax concessions
ment was to change the terms of de- produced "unprecedented peacetime
bate on U.S. social policy. He shifted [budget] deficits." The national debt
public (and congressional) attention incurred over the past four years will
from new domestic programs to self- nearly equal the sum of all previous
help and budget cutting. The results, debt in U.S. history. The 1981 cumula-
according to this Urban Institute tive national debt of less than $800 bil-
study, are sometimes surprising. lion will swell to more than $1.5
Hardest hit were the working poor, trillion in 1985.
who benefited little from Reagan's tax The authors observe that Reagan
cuts, suffered most in the 1981-82 re- blames former presidents for the high
cession, and were further afflicted by inflation (12.4 percent i n 1980) and
curbs on social programs. unemployment (seven percent) that he
In 1982, a total of 34.4 million Amer- faced when he took office. In fact, they
icans were living in poverty, as offi- say, these difficulties were largely the
cially defined. Under Reagan, "the product of the international oil crises
rich got richer as the poor got poorer," of the 1970s and, thus, beyond the con-
say the authors. However, "the safety trol of the United States.
net is still largely intact for the non- Reagan's White House also claims
working poor," notably single successes that were not of its own
mothers and the elderly. Moreover, doing. For the 8.6 point drop in infla-
most of those able-bodied Americans tion between 1980 and 1983, the au-
(some 500,000 recipients of welfare thors say, Reagan must share credit
checks and almost one million poten- with "good luck and the Federal Re-
tial food stamp recipients) who were serve [Board]." Half the decline came
deprived of benefits by Congress con- a t the cost of a severe "tight money"
tinue to work instead of reapplying for recession that produced 11 percent
government assistance. jobless rates in 1981-82. Another third
Reagan's tax policy had similar re- came from favorable shifts in food, en-
sults. It did not favor poorer Ameri- ergy, and import prices.
cans by conferring immediate Many of Reagan's more dramatic re-
benefits, but spurred the work ethic form moves were blocked or blunted
that Reagan believes is their best long- by Congress or the courts, note the au-
term hope. Tax cuts gave the poorest thors. The Food S t a m p Program,
families a reduction of only three dol- slated by the White House for 51.7 per-
lars a year, while bestowing $2,429 on cent cuts over four years, was sliced
families in the wealthiest 20 percent of only 13.8 percent by Congress. Indeed,
U.S. society. But the tax reductions most of the Reagan policies (e.g.,
encouraged greater work effort gener- changing federal enforcement of civil
ally, by offering incentives to people to rights) have been mandated not by
toil longer hours or to seek higher and Congress but by executive action,
more challenging positions since the meaning that future presidents can
"net financial rewards" for work had easily reverse many steps taken dur-
increased. ing the "Reagan Revolution."
The Wilsoii Quarierly/Winter 1984

45
The Belgian painter Rent! Magritte was a champion of surrealist art, which
aimed at expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of conscious
control. Does a work such as his 1937 Le principe du plaisir (Thepleasureprin-
ciple) suggest that the artist had a "mind"? If so. must such a "mind" be hu-
man? Could a computer have had Magritte's vision-and put it to canvas?

46
The first philosopher in the Western tradition was probably Thales
of Miletus, Pondering the world around him in the 6th century B.c.,
he decided that everything is composed, in one way or another, of
water. After Thales, things became more complex.
Later Greeks added other fundamental elements: air, earth,
and fire. Then came Socrates' teacher, Anaxagoras. He argued
that all the elements were directed by something even higher:
nous (mind), the "purest of all things." Ever since, philosophers
have puzzled over the mystery of the mind.
Does it exist? If so, how does it relate to the material
world-including that mass of maybe a trillion nerve cells that
is the human brain? Or is it a mirage, no more than an idea that
Homo sapiens (Man the knower) developed in the prescientific
era to explain the capacity for thought, feeling, and deliberate
action that marks him off from the rest of nature?
Mirage or not, changing notions about the mind and the na-
ture of reality have been important all through history. The
foundations of religion, already weakened by the Reformation,
were further shaken by Thomas Hobbes's argument that all is
matter, the soul is a chimera, and free will an illusion ("nothing
taketh a beginning from itself"). The growth of modern science
both spurred and was spurred by the ideas of John Locke and
other 17th-century Empiricists concerning the veracity of hu-
man perception. Metaphysical theories have shaped views
about personal responsibility, and crime and punishment.
Even so, the mind faded as an object of academic curiosity in
Europe and the United States some years ago. In the 1920s, psy-
chology was claimed by the "behaviorists," who said that human
actions can be studied solely in terms of stimulus and response,
reflecting a Hobbesian view that people are basically automa-
tons. Philosophy also left the mind off its agenda, especially after
Gilbert Ryle blasted "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine" in
his 1949 polemic, The Concept of Mind.
Lately, the mind-or, rather, interest in the mysteries it rep-
resents-has made a comeback. On campus, philosophy courses

47
THE MIND
are regaining popularity, and behaviorism is giving way to cogni-

tive psychology, the study of the thinking processes. Meanwhile,
new perspectives on the long closed world of mental operations
are being provided both by advances in the neurosciences and the
explosion in information technology. The question raised by
HAL, the willful computer in the 1968 film 2001, is getting seri-
ous attention: Can a machine have a mind?
Here, Richard M. Restak reviews the philosophers' struggle
with the idea of the mind, Robert J. Sternberg explores the promise
of cognitive psychology, and Robert Wright assesses the hopes that
information technology may yield "artificial intelligence."
by Richard M.Restak
Someone once described a philosopher as a blind man in a
dark room looking for a black cat that was not there. If the au-
thor was referring to a philosopher trying to define the human
mind, he may have had a point.
At first glance, a definition of the mind seems obvious. After
all, we speak of it daily. We talk of making up (or losing) one's
mind, call some of our neighbors "mindless," and sometimes
suggest that one of our nearest and dearest does not "know his
own mind." But mostly, we use the word as shorthand for mem-
ory, feeling, intelligence, reason, perception, judgment, or some-
thing else. Do we add anything to our discussion when we speak
of the mind instead of talking more specifically of, say, thinking
or remembering? Or is the mind such a vague concept that, de-
spite our best efforts, we are like the blind philosopher stum-
bling around a darkened room?
One reflection of our difficulty with the mind is the fact that
there is no exact word for it in some languages-even German,
the medium of many philosophers and of the founders of psy-
chology. When Immanuel Kant was trying to create an anatomy
of the mind for his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he found that
he could not even invent a precise term for the matrix within
which, he claimed, are embedded sensibility, understanding,
reason, and judgment. When they talk of the mind, Germans
The Wilsoii QuarterlyWinter 1984

48
THE MIND
The 16th-century Domini-

can friar Johannes Rom-
berch saw the mind as a
series of "faculties" that
processed information re-
ceived by the senses.
sometimes use the quaint term Gemut, which refers to a per-

son's nature. On other occasions they favor Seek, which corre-
sponds to the Greek psyche and to soul in English. Then there is
Geist, or spirit.
But none of these is quite right. Many who seek to under-
stand the mind do not believe in a soul. And what exactly is
spirit? Despairing of a satisfactory definition, some thinkers
have decreed the black cat out of existence. In Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature (1979), the American philosopher Richard
Rorty dismissed the mind as "just a blur-the sort of thing you
get when you lay tracings of two delicate and complicated de-
signs down on top of each other."
But if the mind does not exist, why was it necessary to in-
vent it? And when did the invention take place?
No one will ever know if the idea first occurred to some cave
man contemplating his image on the surface of a pond. But the
earliest writing showing an awareness of something like what
philosophers later called the mind is a series of "dream books"
composed on clay tablets by the Assyrians in the fifth or sixth
millenium B.C. These deal with dreams about death, the loss of
teeth or hair, even the shame of finding oneself naked in pub-
lic-all matters implying belief in a personal identity.
A society's view of dreams may be a measure of its sophisti-
cation about the mind: A belief in the reality of dream content
implies a failure to distinguish fantasy from reality, without

49
THE MIND
which a concept of mind is impossible. Primitive man, as philos-

opher Charles W. Morris noted in Six Theories of M i n d (1932),
'makes no sharp distinction between mind and nature, between
a private and subjective life of consciousness and an outward
world of corporeal events. There is no formulated problem as to
how mind and nature can interact, or how mind can know a
world that is not mind."
The ancient Egyptians' preoccupation with a god of dreams,
Serapis, probably coincided with a concern about the relation of
the body to the mind or spirit. Their observation that life de-
pended on breath, and that death coincided with the cessation
of respiration, provided the basis for a belief that the spirit
dwells within the body but does not depend on it for existence. It
was the spirit that required the food, jewels, games, and other
items found in Egyptian tombs.
To the early Greek philosophers, the mind was pivotal in
the maintenance of order and reason in the world. Anaxagoras
declared it the ruler of "the whole revolving universe," which
mind had put in motion "in the beginning." Plato went further,
saying that the mind was not only immaterial but separate from
the body, which it governed. But while the Greeks generally be-
lieved that the body was involved with the senses and conscious
awareness, and that the mind's realm was knowledge, language,
intelligence-and, most of all, reason-it was left to others to
develop the problem that bedevils philosophy today.
The 'Third Eye'

That is the so-called mind-body problem. It dates from the
17th-century work of the first modern philosopher, the French
scientist and mathematician Rene Descartes. Aiming to tear
down the authoritarian ideas of medieval church philosophers
and construct a basis for the advancement of science, Descartes
argued in his Meditations (1641) that if all assumptions about re-
ality are tested, there is only one assertion that is not open to
doubt: that man thinks. The one proof of existence, he con-
cluded, was consciousness: "I think, therefore I am."
- -
Richard M . Restak, 42, is a neurologist and member of the faculties at

Georgetown University Medical School and the Washington School of Psy-
chiatry. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he received an A.B. from Gettys-
burg College (1962) and an M.D. from Georgetown (1966).He is the author
o f Premeditated Man: Bioethics and Control of Future Human Life
(1975), The Brain: The Last Frontier (1979), The Self-seekers (1982),
and The Brain (1984). Copyright 0 1984 by Richard M.Restak.

50
THE MIND
He said that the world was composed of both matter and

immaterial spirit. Man's body hosts a "rational soul," or mind,
which Descartes put in the pineal gland in the brain. Perception
did not depend on the organ doing the perceiving. It was this
"third eye" that evaluated events in and beyond the body.
In Descartes's day, when the brain's chemical and electrical
workings were unknown, that was an arresting argument. He
did not explain how matter and something immaterial could in-
teract, in defiance of all known laws of nature. But his idea that
somewhere humans have an inner observer who "experiences"
and comments upon events in the surrounding world survived.
This assertion of the existence of two interdependent but funda-
mentally incomparable aspects of reality, mind and matter, is
known as dualism. Its legacy is a series of questions. Is the mind
different from the brain? Can a computer have a mind? What is
the role of consciousness in a theory of the mind?
The dualist view was taken to extremes by Bishop George
Berkeley, the Irish-born, 18th-century Idealist philosopher. He
maintained that the material world really does not exist: It sim-
ply consists of images in the mind, and God is the source of all
perception. Said Berkeley: "To be is to be perceived."
Berkeley's Idealism was hard to come to terms with, as
James Boswell's account of Samuel Johnson's riposte showed:
"Striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone till he
rebounded from it, 'I refute it thus!'" Of course, all that Johnson
knew of the stone was his own experience of it-precisely Berke-
ley's point.
How, in fact, does one prove that a thing exists apart from
somebody's perception of it? The British theologian and novelist
Ronald Knox limned the problem in a pair of limericks:
There was a young man who said, "God

Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
Dear Sir:
Your astonishment's odd.
1 am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God.

51
THE MIND
The Scotsman David Hume tried to resolve the mind-matter

dilemma with an agnostic brand of Idealism called Skepticism. He
argued that the mind was just "a bundle" of different perceptions,
whose "ultimate cause is perfectly explicable by human reason."
But in a moment of candor rare for a philosopher, Hume admitted
continuing puzzlement: "I dine, I play backgammon, I converse
and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four
hours' amusement, I return to these speculations, they appear so
cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to
enter into them any further. . . ."
The Beetle in the Box

Well before Hume's time, the influence of religion was wan-
ing. Indeed, Berkeley's Idealism was meant to counter the ef-
forts of various 17th- and 18th-century thinkers to expel the
mind from the debate about reality. Spurred by such works as
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and the ideas of the French
philosopher Julien de La Mettrie, who viewed man as a soulless
creature ruled by the laws of nature, materialism-the proposi-
tion that only matter and energy exist-took hold.
By the late 18th century, the German dramatist and scien-
tist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe suggested an alternative to
haggling over the mind's "nature." He argued that it is only
truly revealed in action: "We exert ourselves in vain to describe
the character of a human being; but assemble his actions, his
deeds, and a picture of his character will confront us."
This emphasis on behavior has parallels in the Eastern phi-
losophies, particularly Zen Buddhism, which takes the view
that one is as one does. Goethe introduced in the West the idea
that, as the late Walter Kaufmann of Princeton observed in Dis-
covering the Mind (1980), "man is his deeds, that mind is what it
does, and that the way to discover the mind is not through
concept-mongering, but through experience."
Experience implies development, a possibility ignored by
earlier thinkers. In Kant's work, for instance, there is, as Kauf-
mann notes, "no inkling that the mind might change in the
course of history, not to speak of biological evolution or the
course of a person's life." The notion of a developmental mind
would be central for later theorists, notably for the Germans
who launched psychology in the 19th century and for Jean Pia-
get, the 20th-century Swiss student of child development.
If the mind develops over time, as such men believed, it is
best understood as a process, rather than as an entity of some
kind. The correct way to proceed, therefore, is to study feelings,

52
THE MIND
emotions, desires, thoughts, and fantasies. The mind is all of

these, yet it cannot be precisely defined by reference to any one
of them alone.
To the psychiatrist, "mind" is synonymous with emotions;
to the cognitive psychologist, it refers to the ways we perceive
and process information; to the philosopher, it involves reason
and logic. Each of these specialists focuses on a different aspect
of man's mental life, and each one, like the proverbial blind men
palpating the elephant, is convinced that his conclusions are the
basis for broad generalizations.
Viewing the confusion raised by these approaches, some phi-
losophers have contended that the existence of the mind is so obvi-
om that no proof is required. Certainly it is difficult to disagree
that there is something unique about what New York University
philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "subjective character of expe-
rience." If we wish to know the mind, we have merely to close our
eyes and experience a state of utter subjectivity.
Yet when we try to describe what we experience by intro-
spection, we run into trouble: Language cannot adequately ex-
press it. Moreover, what we learn cannot be verified in any way.
Philosophical issues fascinated the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. The figures in his
1956 lithograph Bond of Union might be musing over a metaphysical question:
Is the world-other people, even the universe-all in the mind?
The Wilson QuarferlyIWinter 1984

53
THE MIND
DEFENDING THE 'GHOST'
Just as most thinkers in the past saw the mind as a mysterious im-
material essence, most of those who ponder metaphysics today hew
hard to some sort of materialism, a view that everything "mental"
will eventually be explained in terms of physical laws. Two vigorous
dissenters are Sir John Eccles, the Australian neurobiologist who
won a Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on showing how electrical
impulses are transmitted in the brain, and Daniel N. Robinson, pro-
fessor of psychology at Georgetown University.
In The Wonder ofBeing Human (1984), they argue that the most ar-
dent materialists aim to "show that our ageless talk about the mind,
feelings, and the like is but a vestige of religiomagical ignorances. It
is finally 'ghost talk,' whose vocabulary will be properly translated
by the findings of science, and thereupon eliminated from philo-
sophically polite discourse." If the materialists have their way, they
say, "all religions will finally be seen as the mythologies they are,
and, apart from literary purposes, we will speak of the 'human con-
dition' in the precise and morally neutral language of physiology."
What is new about this "nonsense," Eccles and Robinson main-
tain, is only "the willingness of otherwise sensible men and women
to accept it." It was to underline his dismay about materialism in
the 18th century, they say, that England's Bishop George Berkeley
pressed his Idealism: the proposition that all one can really know of
anything is what is in one's mind, such as a perception, an image, a
thought, a memory-in short, an idea. Far from needing a material
brain to have a mind, he argued, one first had to have a mind to
know anything about matter. Berkeley's Idealism, say Eccles and
Robinson, "was designed not to make us skeptical about the 'real
world' but to show us how such a world is literally and factually un-
imaginable in the absence of mind."
Asked about Idealism today, modern materialists are apt first to
dismiss it as "rubbish." But finally, the authors say, they are likely
to make the same objection to it that modern dualists do, which is
simply that it does not square with common sense: It "does not sat-
isfy our deepest intuitive understandings of the relationship be-
tween ourselves and the world around us.''
But materialism, the authors insist, fails the same test: Any view
"that obliges us to deny the existence of thoughts, feelings, motives,
will, memory, imagination, moral sensibility, and consciousness is
false because it is incredible. For it to be incredible, there must be
disbelief and, therefore, belief."
Thus, "arguments seeking to reduce mind to matter or to elimi-
nate it altogether are self-defeating precisely because they are argu-
ments." To argue is to believe. And to believe, Eccles and Robinson
would have it, is to have a mind.

54
THE MIND
When someone looks into himself, the Austrian philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested, he encounters a "beetle in a
box" that he alone can see. No one can enter into the conscious-
ness of another and experience his "beetle." Introspection, as a
proof of the mind's existence, is therefore a blind alley, bordered
on one side by a vicious solipsism ("only I exist") and on the
other by a hopeless agnosticism ("Who are you to tell me what I
am feeling or thinking? Or I to tell you, for that matter?"). The
existence or nonexistence of the mind thus becomes a puzzle
worthy of Kafka.
aterialism and Machines

Attempts have been made to accept the situation, to say
that the mind is simply an "immaterial substance." But does
this make sense? Inflation, poverty, and health are not "sub-
stances" or "things" but, rather, terms to describe aspects of re-
ality. In order to use the word poverty, most people do not
mentally envision a ghostly substance that somehow exists out-
side of perceptual awareness. Yet when it comes to the mind,
many thinkers persist in treating it as a specific entity, much as
they might speak of a chair or a mountain range. What they are
doing, however, is confusing a thing and a process.
This confusion permeates our language and culture. Colin
Boakemore's T h e Mechanics o f the Mind (1977) and Anthony
Smith's T h e Mind (1984) are two popular books that are actually
about brain research, neurophysiology. The titles imply that by
studying the brain one can learn something about the nzind-
that it is something that can be taken apart, tinkered with, per-
haps even tuned up.
The mind-as-mechanism idea persists even among scientists.
In the 1950s, the British philosopher Charles Dunbar Broad ob-
served that "if a man referred to his brother or to his cat as 'an in-
genious mechanism,' we should know that he was either a fool or a
physiologist. No one in practice treats himself or his fellow man or
his pet animals as machines." Yet, he added, scientists "seem often
to think it their duty to hold in theory what no one outside a luna-
tic asylum would accept in practice."
The mind-as-machine view has, nevertheless, received some
support from studies of brain injuries. Damage to parts of the
brain can produce mental impairment. Intelligence, memory,
language, motivation, perception-all can be affected by an in-
jury. Indeed, consciousness, basic to any theory of the mind, de-
pends on a thumbnail-sized area in the brain stem;
brain-surgery patients, who are usually kept awake during oper-
The Wilson Quarle+/Wmier 1984

55
THE MIND
ations since no pain is felt when the brain is touched or cut, have
lost consciousness when this area has been pierced by a probe.
It is thus tempting to declare that the mind is simply the
brain and put an end to 2,000 years of speculative philosophy-
despite the fact that the mind involves a series of activities that,
now a t least, cannot be explained in purely neurobiological
terms. This declaration was made by the behaviorists, who de-
cided that the mind was irrelevant and demanded that psychol-
ogy restrict itself to what can be observed. While a generation of
psychologists explored the workings of stimulus and response,
"Skinner boxes," and maze-running rats, they ignored decision-
making, changes of "heart," resolutions, religious conversions,
and other mental operations that occur in the absence of any ob-
servable behavior.
By the 1960s, these and other weaknesses of behaviorism
led materialist philosophers to new ways of explaining away the
mind and mental phenomena. One argument was that, to under-
stand the mind, one need only discuss matter and its "transfor-
mations" into sensations, images, memories, and other
manifestations. Today, the most common expression of this po-
sition is the "central-state identity theory," which holds that the
mind is nothing more than the state of the brain at any given in-
stant. In this view, it is at least theoretically possible to infer
thoughts from observations of changes within the brain, since
the brain and the mind are identical.
This theory has several interesting implications. If the mind
is indeed nothing more than a manifestation of one material
substance (the brain), then there is nothing precluding the de-
velopment of a mind within other material bodies (the silicon
chips of a computer). To the committed materialist, when one
achieves a sufficient degree of complexity in an "artificial-
intelligence" machine-presto!-mind will emerge.
The 'Criteria Question'

The difficulty here stems from a persistent problem: the
lack of firm criteria for defining what the mind is. If a machine
achieves a mind-like status, how is it to be recognized?
John McCarthy of Stanford, a pioneer in the artificial-
intelligence development effort, has this to say on the subject:
"Machines as simple as home thermostats can be said to have
beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most
machines capable of problem-solving performances." His point
is that, since machines can be said to hold beliefs, a feature of
the human mind, they too can be said to have minds.
The W i l m Quarterly/Winter 1984

56
THE MIND
Rend Descartes, here in a

17th-century engraving,
believed that those who
pursue philosophy
should do nothing else:
He sold the French es-
tates he had inherited so
as to be able to think
"without cares or pas-
sions to trouble me."
Ponder the implications of this view. If thermostats possess

beliefs, then the same could probably be said for automated
doors, microwave ovens, surface-to-air missiles, burglar alarms,
and other labor-saving mechanical devices-perhaps even
toasters, which "decide" when the bread is done. The list of
things with beliefs might finally include just about everything.
Which is no help at all. Instead of clarifying our ideas about
mind, notes philosophy professor John R. Searle of the University
of California, Berkeley, the thermostat-as-mind argument only
confuses the issue. "For now the mind is everywhere. What we
wanted to know is what distinguishes the mind from thermostats."
In recent years, several philosophers and artificial-
intelligence specialists have tried to specify qualities that serve
as criteria for defining the mind. Among the candidates, besides
the holding of beliefs: purposeful behavior, "intentionality"
(e.g., the ability to desire or choose), and a capacity for con-
scious, subjective experience. Some have suggested conscious
awareness-though this falls afoul of the fact that when we are
not conscious (as in dreamless sleep), we do not lose all of our
beliefs and, say, cease to be Republicans or to desire world
THE MIND
peace and universal brotherhood. Beliefs, or attributes such as

jealousy, often operate outside of awareness, becoming con-
scious only at times.
Cognitive psychology and neurophysiology have only re-
cently conferred scientific respectability on the insight that
many important components of the mind remain permanently
outside of awareness. In a word, we are denied accessibility to
our own internal acts. Although it was Sigmund Freud who first
popularized the notion, belief in unconscious actions is not at all
limited to psychoanalysts. "A great deal of our thinking pro-
ceeds without conscious awareness," writes Oxford philosopher
Stuart Hampshire. "In the exercise of the use of language itself
and in many of our skills, we are thinking preconsciously, work-
ing things out without knowing how we worked them out, or by
what steps we arrived at the conclusion.''
The Great Mistake?

Consider an example cited by Bertrand Russell. "Suppose
you are out walking on a wet day, and you see a puddle and
avoid it. You are not likely to say to yourself: 'There is a puddle;
it would be advisable not to step in it.' But if somebody said,
'Why did you suddenly step aside?' you would answer, 'Because
I didn't wish to step into that puddle.' You know, retrospec-
tively, that you had a visual perception, and you expressed this
knowledge in words. But what would you have known, and in
what sense, if your attention had not been called to the matter
by the questioner?"
A proposed answer to the failings of consciousness and self-
awareness as measures of the mind is to consider the mind as a
form of information. In God and the New Physics (1983), physi-
cist Paul Davies argues that "if the mind is basically 'organized
information,' then the medium of expression of that information
could be anything at all; it need not be a particular brain or in-
deed any brain. We are 'messages in circuitry,' and the message
itself transcends the means of its expression."
Despite the appealing simplicity of this argument, it re-
mains obvious that mental operations involve more than infor-
mation. The essence of what we call the mind often consists of
deciding what to do with information already at hand.
Machines, too, exhibit dualism: They are often engaged in
activities that cannot be described in mechanical terms. "If a
computer is carrying out mathematics," says Richard Gregory,
professor of neuropsychology at the Brain and Perception Labo-
ratory at England's University of Bristol, "you need mathemat-

58
THE MIND
ical concepts to describe what is going on; electronics is not

adequate, mechanics is not adequate. So there's a dualism in a
machine, but not a metaphysical dualism in the sense of a hov-
ering mind affecting a machine. But rather that the procedures
carried out by the machine are richer than and different from
the mechanical and electronic processes described by the engi-
neer, and I think this is also true of the brain."
This separation between physical structures and processes
carried out bv these structures aw~liesto both machines and
A.
brains. The brain is a physical structure, yet it also carries out

many processes-thinking, remembering, and the other activi-
ties that Descartes describes as res cogitans. What is gained, in
the end, by bundling these processes and labeling the resulting
melange "the mind"?
The invention of the mind is not only unnecessary, but illog-
ical as well. To introduce the mind when discussing " neurowhvsi-
L J
ology or the mechanics of computers is to engage in what

philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in his 1949 attack on dualism, The
Concept of Mind, called a "category mistake": equating terms
that actually are of different logical types. Contrasting mind and
matter, Ryle suggested, is as illegitimate as would be the con-
trast of "'she came home in a flood of tears' and 'she came home
in a sedan-chair.'"
To talk of the relationship of the mind to the brain, or the
mind to a computer, is to make just such a category mistake.
Thinking, remembering, reasoning, perceiving-such processes
result from the activities of brains and, in recent times, ma-
chines as well. But these processes are not equivalent to a
thing-the mind-any more than the flight of a swan can be
considered a thing somehow separate from the swan itself.
Why postulate, as so many have, the existence of a "mind"
interposed between a mysterious mental process and the brain,
or computer, that makes such a process possible?
The Wilson QuarterlsIWinier 1984

59
THE MIND
by Robert J. Stemberg
Most of us spend much of each day thinking-about our

work, the world we live in, and whatever comes to our attention.
Cognitive psychologists are scientists who think about thinking
itself. Can we identify the mental processes involved? If so, how
do we use them? How might we improve them?
Serious people have been pondering the nature of thought
for centuries. As a scientific pursuit, however, the study of think-
ing-cognition-is relatively new.
When Wilhelm Wundt, the German experimental psycholo-
gist, launched what he called the science of immediate experi-
ence during the late 19th century, scientific study of all kinds
was flourishing. Physics, the most "objective" of all the disci-
plines, was probing the mysteries of matter and energy. But
man, too, was a subject of wide interest, spurred in part by Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. Physiolo-
gists approached the human body as an apparatus ruled by the laws
of physics and chemistry. The psychologists, aiming to be as me-
thodical as anyone else, also dealt with man as mechanism-
I'homme machine as 18th-centuryphilosopher Julien de La Mettrie
put it. They focused on the observable and measurable. A distance
was to be kept from what the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund
Freud, would call "psychic reality."
But how to explore the mind's workings? In 1868, the
Dutchman Frans Donders suggested that a start be made with a
"subtraction method." For instance, he said, the time required
to add two one-digit numbers could be found by subtracting the
time it took to add four such numbers from the time needed to
add five. Donders studied many mental operations in this way.
Modem cognitive psychology might have developed from that
simple beginning, but it did not. Donders's work was attacked.
Critics argued that his method was scientifically invalid;
there was a chance that subtraction itself altered the mental op-
eration being studied. Enough psychologists shared this and
other worries to abandon Donders's approach.
Psychology then took divergent paths. One was the
stimulus-response approach championed by John B. Watson, in
Behaviorism (1925), and further developed by Harvard's B. F.
Skinner and others. To the behaviorists, mental processes were

60
THE MIND
The 19th-century German Wilhelm Wundt launched psychology as the study of

mental processes; Harvard's B. F . Skinner and others shifted the focus to behav-
ior, but now the science is again dealing with processes.
largely irrelevant. They aimed to explain behavior wholly in

terms of punishment and reward, carrot and stick. This idea
seemed to promise "results," and came to dominate psychology,
especially in the United States and the Soviet Union.
The other path was the Gestalt, or "holistic," approach of the
Germans Wolfgang Kohler and Max Wertheimer. They thought
mental processes critical to organizing information provided by
the senses, but hard to analyze. And even if one knew all the mind's
processes, they said, one still would not understand mental per-
formance well; the whole is greater than its parts.
The behaviorist and Gestalt camps debated for years over
who best advanced the science. But by around 1960, the debate
was stale. It was apparent that behaviorism just was not going
to tell us much about how people handle complex functions,
such as learning languages and solving problems, because it ig-
nored the mental processes involved. Bothersome too was the
behaviorists' denial of the existence of anything like free will-a
fact that stirred novelist Arthur Koestler to blast behaviorism as
' a monumental triviality that has sent psychology into a mod-
ern version of the Dark Ages." Holistic theory, for its part,
seemed merely to redescribe mental phenomena, rather than ex-

61
THE MIND
plain them. Psychology was ready for a new approach.

As so often happens in science, a number of psychologists be-
gan to see things in a new way at the same time. By the late
1950s, Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University, George
Miller at Harvard (now at Princeton), and others were urging re-
newed emphasis on cognition. The way to understand mental
functioning, they said, was to understand mental processing.
By then, sophisticated research tools were available. The
computer offered not only new ways of running tests, but also
the possibility of simulating human cognition. Precision instru-
ments improved experimentation. Saul Sternberg of Bell Labo-
ratories was able to show how an alternative to Donders's
century-old subtraction method could isolate mental processes
without raising the doubts that Donders's tests had: In 1966, he
measured operations taking as little as 40 milliseconds-the
time required to compare a digit on paper with the mental rep-
resentation of a digit in the head.
Thus equipped, psychologists were ready to probe cognition
deeply. What kinds of things could they learn?
Consider this problem of analogy:
WASHINGTON is to ONE as LINCOLN is to

(a) FIVE (b) TEN (c) FIFTEEN (d) TWENTY
Analogies have long served as a basis for measuring intelli-

gence. Early in this century, the study of mental ability was
based chiefly on "factor analysis," a statistical method of relat-
ing intelligence-test scores to mental ability. If some students
take tests in vocabulary, reading comprehension, figural analo-
gies, and letter-series completions, those who test well (or
poorly) in vocabulary might be expected to do the same in read-
ing; ditto for figural analogies and letter series. This suggests
that there are underlying verbal and reasoning "factors." Factor
analysis has confirmed this.
But factor analysis could not take psychology very far. Tests
could not prove one factoral theory of mind to be better than
others, or even to be false; in science, a theory is not deemed
worthy of attention unless it can be proven wrong if it is wrong.
Factor analysis also just did not say much about the processes
underlying intelligence: Merely to say that a good analogy-
Robert J. Stemberg, 34, is a professor o f psychology at Yak. Born in Maple-

wood, N.J., he received a B.A. from Yale (1972) and a Ph.D. from Stanford
(1975).He edited The Handbook of Human Intelligence (l982)and is the au-
thor of Beyond I.Q.: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (1984).

62
THE MIND
solver has strong reasoning ability means little.

Cognitive psychology deals with intelligence by separating rea-
soning into components. Faced with analogies such as the one
above, people perform four main processes before they answer.
Encoding, which translates a stimulus into a mental represen-

tation. Here, one might encode the information that WASHING-
TON was a president, is on a bank note, and was a war leader.
Inference, which finds a rule that relates the first term of an
analogy to the second. The relations between WASHINGTON
and ONE: He was the first president, is on a $1 bill, and was a
leader in the first major American war.
Mapping, which finds a " higher order" rule relating the two
halves of the analogy. Both WASHINGTON and LINCOLN are
presidents, faces on bills, and war leaders.
Application, which generates a rule that forms a correct an-
swer and rejects the alternatives. Here, the answer is (a) FIVE,
reflecting LINCOLN'S image on the $5 bill.
By analyzing processes in this manner, cognitive psycholo-

gists have addressed many questions. Some of the problems that
have come under study:
H How long does thinking take? The time required by a
mental process can be measured. For some verbal analogies, I
have found that people tend to spend roughly 54 percent of their
time encoding the terms, 12 percent inferring relations, 10 per-
cent mapping higher order relations, seven percent applying re-
lations, and 17 percent in giving the answer. If an analogy is
solved in five seconds, 2.7 seconds would be spent in encoding.
What distinguishes "good" reasoners? In most induc-
tive problems (those without a logically necessary solution),
adept reasoners are usually faster than others at answering, but
spend more time "up front" deciding what to do; in physics, for
instance, experts tend to pause at the beginning of a problem to
"represent" it with a diagram or a set of equations,. Poorer rea-
soners are more likely to jump to a conclusion, then reach a
dead end. They take a "local" approach, dealing more with the
specifics of a problem than with its "global" aspects.
What is "general" about general intelligence? People
who are good at certain mental activities are good at others.
Those who read with high comprehension tend to have big vo-
cabularies, to be adept reasoners, to have large stores of general
information, and to be articulate. To factor-analytic theorists,
this suggested that a "general factor" of intelligence exists. But
merely labeling "general" ability does not say what it is.
The Wilson QuurterlvlWinter 1984

63
THE MIND
We have found that the mental processes cited above are

used in almost all tests yielding a "general" intelligence factor.
Research on analogies shows that while good reasoners tend to
be faster than others in inference, mapping, application, and re-
sponse, they are slower in the first step, encoding. They spend
more time getting a clear sense of a problem and thus need less
time to solve it. So general intelligence can be explained at least
in part in terms of the processes used.
But even more important are the higher order processes
that direct the operation. While inference and application, say,
are important to general intelligence, even more basic is the
"executive" process that decides to use them. Cognitive analysis
has thus given us a solid basis for understanding general intelli-
gence, which had been lacking before.
Psychologists are also studying the forms of mental repre-
sentation on which mental processes act-the forms that infor-
mation takes in the head. Much of this work grew out of a study
published in 1971 by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler.
They showed people pairs of perspective drawings like these:
The test participants had to judge as quickly as possible

whether the figures differed only in rotation, or also in terms of
a reflection. (In the pair at left, one figure is a mirror image of
the other. The pair at right differ only in rotation.)
The key finding was that the time needed to recognize iden-
tical pairs depends on how far out of congruence they are. This
suggests that people rotate images into congruence in their
minds in the same way that objects can be manipulated in the
real world. Other studies have shown that the speed of mental
rotation-from 320 to 840 degrees per second-depends on the
image. Letters and numbers can be rotated faster than figures.
Robert V. Kail, Phillip Carter, and James Pellegrino reported in
1980, based on results of tests conducted at the University of
Pittsburgh, that the speed with which mental rotation can be
performed increases with age, at least from grade three to col-
lege. Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard has studied other aspects of

64
THE MIND
imaging. When asked "Which is larger, an elephant or a fly?"

people can answer rapidly. But if asked about a cow and a
camel, most take longer; the smaller the disparity between the
two objects, the slower the response. Other research has shown
that in such tests people actually do seem to visualize the two
objects and then compare their size.
Though not all psychologists believe that the case for such
imaging is proven, most now seem persuaded that people can
form mental images and move them around.
ow Knowledge Is Gained
During the last decade or so, there has been much study of
'domain-specific" skill and knowledge-that is, expertise. It is
clear that we cannot fully understand excellent performance in
any area unless we understand the role of experience.
The key study here was conducted by William Chase and
Herbert Simon in 1973, with Master, Class A, and novice chess
players. At the time, it was assumed that the experts had a "stra-
tegic" advantage: They could plan and "see" more moves ahead
than others. But the Chase-Simon tests showed that, in fact, ex-
perts plan no further ahead than beginners (the intermediate
players did the most forward planning). What marked the Mas-
ters was their experience: They could apply recollections of
10,000 or more board positions to their playing.
The findings about memory were also intriguing. The ex-
perts were better than others at recalling chess pieces in impor-
tant board positions, but not at remembering other positions.
They were adept at storing crucial facts.
From chess, research spread to other areas of expertise: read-
ing, vocabulary, physics, medical diagnosis. Some of the most in-
teresting work has been done on political problem solving by
James Voss and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh.
For one study, they gathered four kinds of participants: po-
litical scientists specializing in the Soviet Union, political scien-
tists with other specialties, political-science students, and
chemists with no special knowledge of the Soviet Union. The
participants were asked to imagine that they had been made
head of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture and now had to devise
a plan to boost low crop production.
The more expertise the participants had, the more time they
spent in setting up an initial representation of the problem. The
chemists and students devoted the least time to this; the politi-
cal scientists with non-Soviet expertise, more; and the Soviet
specialists, the most of all. The results recall the tendency of
THE MIND
I DID INTELLIGENCE END EVOLUTION?
Of all the things that differentiate man from other animals, none has
been more important than intelligence, the ability to think and rea-
son. Dolphins, elephants, and other species have developed larger
brains. But only man has been able to use mental power to solve
even elementary problems such as securing a steady food supply-a
task that lesser creatures, with no agriculture, must face over and
over again. How did man evolve, in only a few thousand years, from
a simple hunter to a masterful being who can deal with complex
matters just by, as Isaac Newton said of his approach to questions of
physics, "constantly thinking unto them"?
The time and manner of the appearance of intelligence-now
commonly viewed as a bundle of discrete mental abilities-is un-
known, and may remain so. But in his book Mind, published in 1982
when he was at the University of Rochester, experimental psycholo-
gist David A . Taylor offers an intriguing hypothesis. He argues that
man, in the course of evolution, developed the power to think in
small steps that are analogous to those that children are known to
take as they acquire the capacity to imagine, to communicate, and
finally to reason analytically.
Like the fish, insects, and other lower order beings that first ap-
peared 400 million years ago, a human infant does not think; it re-
acts instinctively to sensations, such as pain and hunger. Then, at
about age two, it develops something known only to mammals and
other higher order animals: the capacity to frame mental images,
even without input from sight or the other senses. It can imagine
things, drawing if necessary only on the information in its brain-a
copious library that, by adulthood, can hold more than 500 times as
much information as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
This in itself was a useful adaptation: A person could imagine dan-
ger in places where he had encountered lions and avoid those places.
But development went further: Man became able to imagine lions
hunting, dozing, and doing other things. That is, he acquired the
ability to produce mental images according to certain patterns. In
much the same way that preschool children first begin to "think,"
humans learned to form sequences of images and to guide them ac-
cording to learned rules. Research has shown that children do not
truly begin to think abstractly until they master language, which
trains them to order images in terms of rules. The same precept,
Taylor argues, applies to the human race. Only after man acquired
good problem solvers to focus on global, up-front planning, but

there is a difference: The chemists could be expected to be excel-
lent problem solvers, but they did not do the global planning
that the political scientists did. Yet research on chemists has
shown that they do considerable global planning when faced
The Wilson Quarterlv/Winrer 1984

66
THE MIND
language did he become capable of abstract thought.

Like imaging, language was useful in itself: It "facilitated vital so-
cial practices such as communal living and organized hunting. The
fact that it also made thinking possible may have been no more than
a serendipity." But thought gave man his "tremendous" edge in the
Darwinian fight for dominance in the world.
The final step in the evolution of intelligence, in Taylor's scenario,
came when man started to think about thinking itself, including
ways to improve it. This may have occurred as recently as the dawn
of recorded history. Early writings show no sign of abstract thought
or description of mental processes. Stories and myths displaying
concern with the ideas and feelings of the characters involved came
later-not too long before the Greeks began to study thinking and to
lay the foundations of modern logic and philosophy. Thus, abstract
thought is a fairly new phenomenon. Says Taylor: "The speed with
which intelligence ultimately evolved once the conditions were right
is testimony to the tremendous advantages it conveyed in the strug-
gle for survival."
But in endowing man with intelligence, says Taylor, "evolution
literally outsmarted itself." Through thought, man has reduced
most of the usual threats to survival, such as hunger, disease, and
climatic hazards. Result: "There is no longer any selection on the
basis of genetic fitness; the weak as well as the strong survive to bear
children, and there is no improvement from one generation to the
next. In short, evolution appears to be over. . . ."
Biological evolution, that is. It has been replaced by cultural evo-
lution, whose basic unit, "its equivalent of the gene, is the idea."
Among the products of this evolution has been the scientific
method, which in a few hundred years has given man vast powers to
shape his world. It may even let him "restart" biological evolution,
through genetic engineering. In sum, Taylor argues, the advent of in-
telligence "brought several billion years of biological evolution to a
halt," but man has "replaced it with a new form of evolution that is
entirely under our control. We are, in effect, the inheritors of evolu-
tion. The future is ours to choose."
with problems in their own field.

The findings are convincing: Knowledge of a specialty plays
a vital role in problem solving. An understanding of mental pro-
cesses alone will not show how experts differ from others.
Yet all this has left some cognitive psychologists, including
THE MIND
me, with a sense of discomfort. Certainly, experts know more

than do novices, which is bound to lead to better performance:
Nonexperts cannot spend much time in up-front planning if
they have no knowledge of the field to apply. But one might
wonder how the experts became experts and why others, with
similar experience, did not. Not everyone who plays thousands
of chess games will become a Master; not all who read a lot will
become expert readers. To understand expertise, then, one must
start not with knowledge, but with its acquisition.
Consider vocabulary. The view my collaborator, Janet
Powell, and I have taken is that differences in vocabulary relate to
differences in abilities to learn new words from their context. Try
to define the two uncommon words in this passage:
Two ill-dressed people-one a tired woman of middle

years and the other a tense young man-sat around a
fire where the common meal was almost ready. The
mother, Tanith, peered at her son through the oam of the
bubbling stew. It had been a long time since his last
ceilidh, and Tobar had changed greatly; where once he
had seemed all legs and clumsy joints, he now was well-
formed. As they ate, Tobar told of his past year, re-
creating for Tanith how he had wandered far in his quest
to gain the skills he would need to be permitted to rejoin
the company. Then, their brief ceilidh over, Tobar
walked over to touch his mother's arm and left.
How do people figure out unknown words and thus build

vocabulary? According to our theory, there are three important
ingredients in the recipe for deriving word meanings: contex-
tual clues, mediating variables, and cognitive processes.
Various contextual clues establish that oam means steam: We
learn that the oam rises from a stew and that one can see through
it. For ceilidh (reunion), we are given two temporal cues: that it
had been a long time since Tobar's last ceilidh and that it is brief,
suggesting that ceilidhs are rare and limited in duration.
Mediating variables affect our ability to use contextual
cues. For instance, multiple appearances of a word (as with
ceilidh) usually help us apply our cognitive processes to the
cues. Three processes are critical here.
One is "selective encoding," by which one decides what infor-
mation is relevant for finding a meaning. For oam, the cues are
that it emanates from a stew, that one can peer through it, and
that it is associated with fire. "Selective combination" enables
one to assemble the cues. "Selective comparison" enables one to

68
THE MIND
relate new knowledge to old knowledge. Here, one would con-

sider things that relate to the clues-and come up with steam.
Selective comparison is especially critical in remembering
new words. Often, one looks up a meaning in a dictionary, then
soon forgets it. When one fails to relate a word to information
one already has, it is difficult to retrieve later.
We have long known that vocabulary is the best single indi-
cator of intelligence. But this did not make any particular sense
in the absence of a theory of how some people acquire large vo-
cabularies, while others do not. We now understand how differ-
ences in this, and in intelligence in general, can be traced in part
to differences in ability to learn new words and concepts.
The processes of learning are not important only to vocabu-
lary, of course. They also operate in what is known as insight.
Consider some famous examples from science.
Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of penicillin was an in-
sight of selective coding. In looking at a Petri dish containing a cul-
ture that had become moldy, Fleming noticed that bacteria near
the mold had been destroyed, presumably by the mold. In essence,
Fleming encoded this visual information in a selective way, zero-
Experiments with sound have raised hopes that IQ, now rated by written
tests, might be measured by brain-wave activity. The waves triggered by au-
ral stimuli have been found to be large and fast moving in bright people.

69
THE MIND
ing in on the part of what he saw that was relevant to the discovery
of the antibiotic. He had no previously available cues for selective
encoding to work on, but he focused on what to him was a new
kind of cue-the destruction of the bacteria by the mold.
An example of an insight of selective comparison is Fried-
rich Kekule's 1865 discovery of the structure of the molecule of
benzene fuel. After struggling with the matter to exhaustion, he
slept and dreamed of a snake curling back on itself and biting its
tail. When he woke up, he realized that the curled snake was a
visual metaphor for the core of the molecule, which is a ring of
carbon atoms.
Since we cannot probe insights of this caliber in experi-
ments, my colleague Janet Davidson and I have studied more
common ones-those needed to solve problems in such books as
Games for the Superintelligent. Two examples:
If you have black socks and brown socks in your
drawer, mixed in a ratio of 4 to 5, how many socks will you have
to take out to make sure of having a pair of the same color?
Water lilies double in area every 24 hours. At summer's
start there is one lily on a lake. It takes 60 days for the lake to be
covered with lilies. On what day is it half covered?
Both problems require minor insights. People who fail the
socks quiz tend to focus on the ratio of black to brown socks, and
then to have trouble seeing how to use the information. But the
ratio is irrelevant, as is seen by those who selectively encode
that the only important facts are that there are two colors, and
that a pair of the same color is needed. Even once this is en-
coded, one must selectively combine the information to realize
that the answer is three socks; even if the first two one pulls out
are brown and black, the third must make a pair.
The second problem also contains irrelevant information (that
there is only one lily at first). It also requires selective combination
to figure out that, with the daily doubling, the lake will be half cov-
ered on the 59th day-the day before it is fully covered.
Although people differ widely in their insight skills, re-
search that Davidson and I have conducted shows that, to some
degree, these skills can be acquired. After some weeks of drill in
selective encoding, combination, and comparison, fourth, fifth,
and sixth graders do better with simple insight problems.
Cognitive psychologists generally hope to use the knowl-
edge they are gaining to improve people's thinking skills. Ulti-
mately, many of us would like to see the day when what we are
THE MIND
learning can be applied not only to everyday problem solving,

but also to the thinking that policy-makers do when they make
the judgments that affect us all.
Has cognitive psychology delivered on its promise? I believe
that it has, in nearly all respects.
First, this science's aim was largely to find out what hap-
pens in one's head as one thinks. Though that goal got lost dur-
ing the focus on behaviorism, research is now providing theories
and methods needed for understanding mental processes.
Second, these theories and methods apply to interesting
problems, such as the nature of imaging, insight, and vocabu-
lary growth. Initially, with any new paradigm, there is a fear
that it will answer only questions that no one cares about. Cog-
nitive psychology has not had this problem.
Third, different aspects of what we are learning are coming
together. In its early days, it seemed that the field might offer
little more than detailed analyses of isolated mental operations
without providing any understanding of how they relate to each
other. This has not happened. For example, we have found that
the insight processes are basically the same as those of vocabu-
lary acquisition-though it is one thing to use selective encod-
ing in divining the meaning of a new word, and another to apply
it in finding that a mold (penicillin) is a potent antibiotic.
But no scientific approach is flawless. There is, in my opinion,
one serious problem with cognitive psychology. It is too cognitive.
Thought is very much influenced by emotions, motivations,
and desires. No matter how finely we analyze the thought pro-
cesses and the mental representations on which they operate,
we will not understand thought in its totality unless we under-
stand how it is driven by, and drives, the noncognitive or "affec-
tive" side of human nature-love, pain, belief, will, and so on.
Cognitive scientists sometimes seem reluctant to acknowl-
edge the need to combine their work with an understanding of
these "softer" aspects of man's nature. Yet I suspect that we will
never understand some of the most important decisions that peo-
ple make, or the true reasons that they solve problems as they do,
unless we probe the noncognitive as well as the cognitive side of
the mind. This remains, as the philosopher and psychologist Wil-
liam James said of the nature of personality, "the most puzzling
puzzle with which psychology has to deal."
The Wilson Qtiarierl~IIh~it~ier

1984
71
THE MIND
by Robert Wright
In July 1979, Italy's Luigi Villa, the world backgammon

champion, took on a robot in a $5,000 winner-take-all match in
Monte Carlo. The robot was linked by satellite to Pittsburgh's
Carnegie-Mellon University, where a Digital Equipment Corpora-
tion PDP-10 computer, animated by a program called BKG 9.8,
mulled things over. Villa was a 2 to 1 favorite; no machine had
ever beaten a world champion in a board or card game.
But BKG 9.8 beat the odds. It won four of five games and,
through judicious use of the doubling die, converted that advan-
tage into a score of 7 to 1. "Only one thing marred the scene," re-
called BKG 9.8's creator, Hans Berliner, writing in Scientific
American. "Villa, who only a day earlier had reached the summit
of his backgammon career in winning the world title, was discon-
solate. I told him I was sorry it had happened and that we both
knew he was really the better player."
Berliner's trade is that ambitious branch of computer science
called artificial intelligence, or AI. Its goal, as defined by Berliner,
is to make computers do things "that if a human being were to do
them, he would be considered intelligent."
Defined this broadly, A1 has room for two kinds of research-
ers. The field's "pragmatists" aim to replicate the results, but not
necessarily the processes, of human cognition. They do not care if
their machines think like humans, as long as they act like hu-
mans. Thus, the electronic chessboards that have brought auto-
mated defeat within reach of middle-income Americans do not
win the way people win-by discerning and short-circuiting the
opposition's strategies, or by forging boldly ahead with a master
plan of their own, or by venting their aggression on a move-by-
move basis. Rather, these machines rely on superhuman feats of
calculation. At each juncture, they trace out thousands of possible
sequences of moves and countermoves, noting the pieces won and
lost, and then assign each possible action a number reflecting its
likely long-term value. The rest even a human could do: make the
move with the highest number.
The other kind of A1 researchers are programmers who, like
Berliner, see their mission partly as the duplication of the human
thinking process. They write programs that work the way the
mind works-or the way they suspect it works. To them, BKG 9.8
The Wilson Quurterlv/Wiuter 1984

72
THE MIND
World War 11 gun directors, such as this one at a Newfoundland base in 1943,
did more than help anti-aircraftweapons track enemy planes; they spurred early
interest in the idea that machines could be imbued with intelligence.
represents a theory of how backgammon players think.

Whether or not programs such as BKG 9.8 can be said to
show "intelligence," they have produced facsimiles reasonable
enough to impress students of human behavior. A1 has drawn the
attention of cognitive psychologists in search of a fruitful meta-
phor for the mind, a fresh stock of terminology, or both. They
have packed journals with "flow charts" of the human thinking
process: Their models of the mind come complete with "prepro-
cessing mechanisms" and "verbal protocols," and can "recover
perceptual inputn-even though they may labor under "incom-
plete feedback conditions."
As Princeton's George Miller has written, many psychologists
have come to take for granted "that men and computers are
merely two different species of a more abstract genus called 'in-
formation processing systems."'
So have some journalists. The press regularly recounts the ex-
ploits of A1 researchers whose progeny "think" like doctors and
"understand" news articles. Alas, as computer scientists them-
selves concede, such accounts fall somewhere between oversimpli-
fication and distortion. Newsweek, reporting in 1980 that comput-
T h e Wilson Quanerl~lWinter1984
73
THE MIND
ers can "draw literary analogies" among Shakespearean plays,

conjured up images of an IBM 4300 poring over Macbeth and then
turning to a worn copy of King Lear. In fact, the computer scanned
plot summaries that read more like the computer language FOR-
TRAN than Elizabethan English: "Macbeth marry Lady-Macbeth.
Lady-Macbeth is a woman-has property greedy ambitious. . . .
Mac-duff is a noble-has property loyal angry. Weird-sisters is a
hag group-has property old ugly weird-number 3."
Sticking to the Weather

Once the hyperbole is stripped away, computer scientists
turn out to be only human-and to consider their machines only
machines. AI's early optimism has been tempered. The difficulty
of replicating even the more mundane cognitive functions has
left some researchers saying what poets, mystics, and various
other skeptics have said all along: The mind is not a computer.
Putting it very bluntly, Marvin Minsky, former head of MIT's A1
laboratory, says, "I'll bet the human brain is a kludge."
The field known today as artificial intelligence might well
have been called "cybernetics," the rubric under which scientists
first tried to simulate thinking electronically. Cybernetics began
during the 1940s as the study of feedback systems. Its founder, the
MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, sought to make anti-aircraft
guns self-aiming by giving them radar information about the speed
and direction of targets. The parallels between this "feedback
loop" and the human nervous system suggested that comparisons
between mind and machine might be fruitful-an idea that fed on
enthusiasm about new "electronic computing machines." Soon cy-
berneticists were building networks of elaborately interconnected
switches, modeled after the brain's masses of neurons. But these
"neural nets" displayed little intelligent behavior. By the late
1960s, this line of research had reached a dead end.
The term "artificial intelligence" was coined by Stanford's
John McCarthy to describe a 1956 conference at Dartmouth,
where he then taught mathematics. In a grant proposal sub-
mitted to the Rockefeller Foundation, McCarthy wrote that the
meeting would address the "conjecture" that each aspect of intel-
ligence can be "so precisely described that a machine can be
made to simulate it."
The conference supported that conjecture. Allen Newell, J. C.
Robert Wright, 27, formerly an associate editor of The Wilson Quarterly,

is a senior editor of The Sciences, the magazine of the New York Academy
of Sciences.
The Wilson Q u a i l e ~ I W m ~1984

e~
74
THE MIND
Shaw, and Herbert Simon, three scientists connected with Carne-

gie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), together with the Rand Corpora-
tion introduced a computer program called LOGIC THEORIST.
Confronted with 52 of the theorems proved by Alfred North White-
head and Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathernatica (1925),
LOGIC THEORIST proved three-fourths of them-and one of its
proofs was more "elegant" (i.e., straightforward) than the original.
Moreover, LOGIC THEORIST did not rely on brute force,
trying every combination of logical rules until it found one that
worked. Instead, it used "heuristics," rules of thumb that nar-
row one's focus in the face of numerous options that may lead
nowhere. Newell, Shaw, and Simon, intent on modeling human
thinking, made their program fallible.
Flushed with success, Simon ambitiously staked out AI's ter-
ritory. There are now, he declared, "machines that think, that
learn, and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is
going to increase rapidly until the range of problems they can
handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human
mind has been applied."
Over the next few years, computer scientists produced one
intriguing plaything after another. The Conversation Machine,
built in 1959,could make passable small talk-so long as its part-
ner communicated by typewriter keyboard and did not stray too
far from the subject of the weather. In 1961, a program written by
an MIT graduate student got an A on a calculus exam. By 1962, a
string quartet had performed music composed by a computer
that had used rules of counterpoint formulated by the 16th-
century Italian Giovanni Palestrina.
The 'Common Sense' Problem
By the mid-1960s, though, the heady years were over. Irnpres-
sive as AI's feats seemed, they still paled in comparison with the hu-
man mind's accomplishments. For example, General Problem
Solver, a program unveiled by Newell, Shaw, and Simon in 1957,
proved to be less capable than its name suggested. True, it was more
of a Renaissance man than was LOGIC THEORIST: It could handle
not only algebra problems but also logical puzzles, such as how to
get three missionaries and three cannibals across a river alive using
only a two-man boat. Still, these are not the kinds of skills most peo-
ple associate with the word "generalist."
General Problem Solver's limitations suggested that intelli-
gence cannot be boiled down to a few versatile techniques. It
seemed, rather, that the human intellect depends on a large rep-
ertoire of tools, many of them useless without vast quantities of
THE MIND
P U T T I N G ' T H E U S E L E S S SCIENCE' T O W O R K
ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer, blinked to life at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania in 1946. But the history of programmable ma-
chines goes back to Charles Babbage, the eccentric 19th-century
English inventor of, among other things, the train cowcatcher. During
the 1830s, he began work on his "analytical engine," which was to use
steam power, punched cards, cogs, levers, and pulleys to solve mathe-
matical and logical problems. Although the British government re-
fused funds to build the contraption, its very concept raised the same
machine-versus-man issues that the work of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
advocates does today. Indeed, Babbage's collaborator, Lord Byron's
science-minded daughter Ada, felt obliged to explain that, while the
engine could do "whatever we know how to order it to" do, it had "no
pretensions to originate anything."
The idea behind Babbage's machine (and ENIAC) originated a lot: an
information industry whose worldwide revenues now total an estimated
$175 billion and whose products are spreading to homes, offices, and fac-
tones everywhere in the industrial world. It has even spawned a genus of
industrial robot that in 1982 numbered about 6,000 in America and
25,000 in Japan. Yet serious work on applications of AI, once called "the
useless science," is fairly recent.
"Vision systems" are a high priority. Most factory robots must
blindly follow their programmed directions; now ways are being devel-
oped for them to "see" and correct their errors as they go about cutting,
welding, sorting, and assembling. Machine Intelligence Corporation of
Sunnyvale, California, and Japan's Yaskawa together market a
$105,000 "inspector" that compares parts on an assembly line with an
image in its memory and removes parts that are bad.
Many firms are working on "expert" systems that can sift through a
"data base" in a given field, answer questions, and offer advice. SRI
International of Men10 Park, California, has stockpiled the expertise of
geologists on natural resources in a program called Prospector. The
program pinpointed a molybdenum deposit deep in Washington's
Mount Tolman that had long eluded human prospectors.
Another A1 goal has been to permit access to data-base information
by way of plain English instead of requiring knowledge of some ar-
cane computer language. Cognate Systems of New Haven, Connecti-
cut, has designed a way of coupling a "natural language front end"
with data on oil wells. To get, say, a map of all wells drilled by a cer-
specialized knowledge. Accordingly, during the late 1960s and

early 1970s computer scientists turned their attention to
,'
knowledge engineering," the transplanting of expertise from
doctors, geologists, and mechanics to "expert systems." This re-
search would eventually produce programs such as
INTERNIST-I, an aid to medical diagnosticians: In a 1983 test
The Wilson QuarterlyIWii71er1984

76
THE MIND
tain firm in a certain area, an engineer need only ask for it. In another
application, IBM is adapting an editing program called EPISTLE to
summarize mail for busy executives.
To date, work on A1 applications has been pursued mainly by
small firms and academic researchers in the United States and Eu-
rope. This is changing.
In 1982, Japan, a laggard in the global computer sales competition,
launched its first broad effort to develop "intelligent" products based
on original, Japanese research. A joint venture of private firms and
public laboratories, backed by a government commitment of $450
million over 10 years, it has been dubbed the Fifth-Generation Project,
reflecting its focus on the new "massively parallel" computers in-
tended to emulate human thought. (Computer generations are defined
by their innards. Today's state-of-the-art machines-the fourth gener-
ation-are built around very large integrated circuits, called VLICs;
the third generation used integrated circuits; the second used transis-
tors; and the first, sired by ENIAC, had vacuum tubes.)
The Japanese, who describe their project as "the space shuttle of
the knowledge world," aim to perfect a range of marketable devices,
such as speech-activated typewriters, optical scanners that can read
written language, and translating machines.
Britain and other European nations have launched major computer
research programs. In the United States, still Number One in informa-
tion technology, several computer firms have set up A1 departments; 18
corporate giants, among them Control Data and Lockheed, have formed
a research and development consortium, headquartered in Austin,
Texas. But the big backer of advanced computer technology is the fed-
eral government, especially the Pentagon. In 1984, the Defense Depart-
ment announced plans to spend $600 million over five years to develop
new computer-based systems. While the focus is on military applica-
tions-such as a robot Army combat vehicle-the hope is to produce
devices whose ability to see, speak, reason, and understand speech will
have civilian uses as well.
U.S. spending by government and industry on advanced computer
technology in 1984 alone may total $230 million. The stakes are high,
too. Joseph P. Traub, head of computer-science studies at Columbia
University, argues that progress in A1 may determine which nation
leads in computers during the 1990sÃ‘and thereby, which "will be the
dominant nation economically." Indeed, where might Britain be had it
built Charles Babbage's analytical engine?
involving cases drawn from the New England Journal of Medi-

cine, it proved nearly as accurate as the attending physicians.
But even with the mechanization of exoertise. A1 still faced the
"common sense problem." Computers can respectable chess and
diagnose soybean-plant pathology with the assurance of a county
agent, yet they cannot comprehend "The Farmer in the Dell."
THE MIND
"It'syour home computer. It wants to know why you're not home." The rapid
spread of low-cost "personal"computers, which first appeared in 1975, helped
wire the notwn of manlike machines into American popular culture.
In trying to imbue computers with common sense, research-

ers have had to grapple with questions of logic. How large a role
does it really play in human thinking? How large a role should it
play in machine thinking?
Marvin Minsky believes that the mind rarely functions with
the rigor of logic: "I suspect we use it less for solving problems
than we use it for explaining the solutions to other people and-
much more important-to ourselves." Machines will not truly
think, he suggests, until they can formulate vague definitions,
harbor inconsistent ideas, and, on weighing evidence and finding
it incomplete, jump to the nearest conclusion.
One of Minsky's favorite illustrations of logic's shortcomings
is the "dead duck." Birds can fly, a duck is a bird, Joe is a duck. A
computer with powers of deduction will conclude that Joe can
fly. But what if Joe is dead? And what about Hubert the penguin,
a bird who will never take wing? A child knows that neither can
fly; a computer relying on deductive logic does not.
Exceptions can be programmed into a computer, but if there
are too many it is not worth devising the rules in the first place.
The real world, Minsky argues, is laced with both rules and ex-
THE MIND
ceptions, yet people cope anyway; deductive logic, therefore,

must not be central to their thinking.
Researchers trying to teach machines to comprehend "natu-
ral language" (such as English) have confronted a second short-
coming of logic. Much of what humans absorb while reading does
not follow logically from what is written. A newspaper reader
does not have an airtight case in concluding that an assault vic-
tim who was "treated and released" was slightly injured. Still,
such common sense reasoning is almost always on target.
Surviving Contradictions
Ambiguity further complicates matters. How is a computer
to know that the meanings of flies and like change from one sen-
tence (time flies like an arrow) to another (fruit flies like an ap-
ple)? Of course, context may clarify things. Is the computer at a
college reunion or an exterminators' convention?
By giving computers such contextual information, Roger
Schank, head of Yale's A1 laboratory, has attacked several prob-
lems of language comprehension. Each of his "scripts" sets the
context, providing generally safe assumptions about the way a
given situation unfolds. Schank's "restaurant" script keeps the
computer from even contemplating the possibility that "tip" refers
to Gallant Prince in the seventh at Belmont, and also facilitates
reading between the lines; when a customer leaves a big tip, the
computer is told, it probably means that he liked the service.
Scripts are variations on "frames," a more general concept
developed by Minsky. Both help computers cope with complexity
by limiting the frame of reference to the situation at hand.
And, some researchers feel, both have limitations when taken
as theories of human cognition. A single script or frame houses
much information, but it would take a great many scripts to get a
person through the day. Do humans really carry around thou-
sands of separate frames and pop a new one into the mental pro-
jector every time they move from the food store to the street, or
turn from the obituaries to the sports page? Is nature, with its
preference for simplicity, really likely to build brains that have to
perform such a complex juggling act? In their simplest form, the-
ories based on frames suggest that this is indeed the case.
There are other theories of cognition that do not call for so
much shuffling of information, but not all can be tested easily on
conventional computers. They are more compatible with a com-
ing generation of machines called "massively parallel," comput-
ers that some tout as the new wave in AI.
If machines are going to think like humans, Minsky says, they
T h e Wilson Quanerlv/Wiiiier 1984

79
THE MIND
must quit defining words with mathematical precision and, instead,

associate each word with a melange of related words. They must be
more like Euthyphro, the Greek sage who could name pious men but
could not give Socrates a definition of piety.
"What if we built machines that weren't based on rigid defi-
nitions?" Minsky has written. "Wouldn't they just drown in par-
adox, equivocation, inconsistency? Relax! Most of what people
'know' already overflows with contradictions. We still survive."
An "associationist" approach to defining words, he believes,
will be easier with massively parallel computers.
Virtually all of today's computers are based on the "von
Neumann architecture" developed by mathematician John von
Neumann during the 1940s. A von Neumann machine is run by a
central processing unit that retrieves information from the com-
puter's memory, modifies it according to the program, and then
either returns it to memory or prints it out and forgets it. Gener-
ally, such machines can do only one thing at a time.
In a machine with parallel architecture, though, different pro-
cessors work on different aspects of a problem simultaneously.
Though parallel computers have been around for some time, thus
far none has been-well, massive. But Thinking Machines Corpo-
ration of Cambridge, Massachusetts, hopes to have a large proto-
type ready in 1985, and MIT is constructing a version of its own,
the Connection Machine. Both will have some 250,000 processors,
each powerful enough to be a capable computer in its own right;
chips will be wired so that each one can communicate with any
other. Even so, the machine will simulate only a thin slice of the
mind, and MIT is already planning a larger version.
Majority Rule
In massively parallel computers, no one processor does any-
thing very sophisticated, and none oversees the operation of the
others. Intelligence is not imposed from the "top down"; it
emerges from the "bottom up," much the way that collectively
intelligent behavior arises in an ant colony despite its non-
hierarchical structure and lack of individual genius.
Proponents of massive parallelism view the mind as a soci-
ety. Jerome Feldman of the University of Rochester writes of
"winner-take-all networks" in which "coalitions" of processors
continually clash. In Feldman's model, concepts are represented
not by strings of symbols, as in a von Neumann computer, but
by patterns of interconnection among processors. This ap-
proach, he says, offers a way to address the issues of ambiguity
and context more economically than do scripts and frames.
The Wilson Quurierlv/Wiii/er 1984

80
THE MIND
Take a sentence such as "John threw a ball for charity." In

the machine envisioned by Feldman, the two senses of the verb
to throw-to hurl, and to host-would live in separate proces-
sors, or "nodes." Upon encountering this sentence, both nodes
would seek support for their interpretations; they would try to
find other words in the sentence with which they have an affin-
ity- with which they are connected.
Both would have immediate success. The hurl node is wired
to the node housing the corresponding sense of ball, a spherical
object. The second sense of to throw, to host, is linked with the
second sense of ball, a dance. Once these two links are activated,
they try to embrace one another.
Victory goes to the majority. When each pair tries to encom-
pass the third key member of the sentence-the swing vote-
only one succeeds. The dance node is connected to the charity
node; charity balls are common enough to warrant that linkage.
But the more conventional sense of ball searches in vain for a
link with charity. The host-dance coalition now has control of
the sentence and will electronically suppress any dissent.
In Feldman's model, as in models embodying scripts and
HAL grows up: In 2010, the sequel to 2001, the ornery computer gives his
"life" to save Capt. David Bowman (Keir Dulled) and spacecraft colleagues.
THE MIND
frames, context helps. If "John threw a ball for charity" had

come up at a social committee meeting, connections already ac-
tivated would have headed off any grassroots drive for a baseball
interpretation. Thus, Feldman says, the "connectionist para-
digm" offers "dynamic" frames. They resolve ambiguity and
take account of context, but do not come in bulky packages that
must be juggled. Instead, a frame is defined by the prevailing
pattern of interconnection among tiny packets of information,
all of which stay put; dynamic frames can be modified subtly or
dramatically without any reshuffling of information.
A Healthy Conflict
Ideas bearing some resemblance to Feldman's have been
around for some time. In Psychology (1893), William James ex-
plored the "principles of connection" in accordance with which
"points" of the brain are linked by "discharges" and thoughts
',
appear to sprout one out of the other." Later, came the cyber-
neticists' "neural nets," designed to learn by memorizing pat-
terns of interconnection among nodes. Because neural nets did
not live up to their billing, the von Neumann architecture was
the only game in town by the 1960s, when psychologists turned
for inspiration to computer science.
Almost every Psychology 101 student since then has encoun-
tered fruits of that search-textbook flow charts tracing the path of
information through a mental processor and into long-term mem-
ory. Had massive parallelism been in vogue years ago, those charts
might look different: Information might be dispersed through a
huge honeycomb, and "bits" processed where they reside.
And the prospect of machines behaving intelligently might
not seem so dehumanizing. No central processing unit will exert
tyrannical rule over a massively parallel machine; the demo-
cratic behavior of the processors will be so unruly that not even
a program's creator will always be able to predict results.
Would that uncertainty reflect a certain capriciousness on
the part of the machine-even, perhaps, a trace of free will?
Some computer scientists will go so far as to call such unpre-
dictable behavior "nondeterministic"-which, in the language
of philosophy, suggests freedom from mechanistic rules.
If massive parallelism lives up to the expectations of its
strong advocates, this question may well be asked: Were the
first 30 years of AI, with their emphasis on the "top down" ap-
proach to simulating intelligence, just a long detour for all the
psychologists who were suckered onto the bandwagon?
Few in A1 seem to think so. Whatever the value of massive

82
THE MIND
parallelism as a metaphor for mind, no one contends that it can

capture the entire thought process. Herbert Simon points out
that, regardless of how information is processed at subconscious
levels, it must pass through the "bottleneck" of conscious atten-
tion, which is clearly a "serial," not a parallel, processor; a per-
son can entertain only one thought at a time.
Simon does not share Minsky and Feldman's high hopes for
massive parallelism. He does agree that logic plays a limited
role in thought-he won the 1978 Nobel Prize in economics for
his theory of "bounded rationality," which stresses the arbitrary
nature of much human decision-making. Still, he notes, conven-
tional computers have shown an ability to simulate nonlogical
processes, even if those simulations take longer than they would
on parallel machines. Much enthusiasm about massive parallel-
ism, he says, is "romanticism."
There is one point, though, on which massive parallelism's
supporters and detractors agree: No matter which of AI's mod-
els of thought prevails, computer science will have made a last-
ing contribution to cognitive psychology. At the very least,
computers force a theoretician to define his terms; it is hard to
turn murky thinking into a successful computer program.
This benefit was foreseen nearly four decades ago by Harvard
psychologist Edwin G . Boring. He had been challenged by Norbert
Wiener to describe a capacity of the brain that no machine could
ever duplicate. Just contemplating that challenge, Boring found,
was enlightening. It forced him to refine his ideas about the nature
of intelligence. Boring urged others to try this experiment in their
heads-to pretend, in essence, that they were computer program-
mers trying to simulate human thought, and consider the issues
that they would thereby confront.
In a 1946 edition of the American Journal of Psychology, he
asked readers: "With what property must a robot be endowed
by its maker in order that it may make discriminations, may re-
act, may learn, may use symbolic processes, may have insight,
may describe the nature of its own functions and processes?"
Contemplating this question, he suggested, is "the way to go" at
the question of how the mind works. "It is a procedure that
keeps us clear."

83
In an ancient Indian legend illustrat- Bronowski's The Identity of Man
ing the wisdom of the god Shiva, (Natural History, 1965, cloth; 1971,
each of two men, a thinker and an paper) and neurosurgeon Wilder
athlete, has his head removed and Penfield's The Mystery of the Mind
grafted onto the other's body. The (Princeton, 1975, cloth & paper).
wife of each becomes confused as to On the materialist side, the central
which portion of her spouse she testament remains philosopher Gil-
should stay with. Shiva, who sensed bert Ryle's The Concept of Mind
the importance of consciousness and (Barnes & Noble, 1949, cloth; Harper,
knew where it lay, told them to go 1983, paper). It was the first modem
with the head. assault on dualism, whose tenets Ryle
Today, readers interested in the attacked with what he concedes is "de-
mind have a problem not unlike that liberate abusiveness."
of the wives. The literature is divided A rather more poetic early work of
into two camps: There are writers materialism is anthropologist Loren
who believe in some form of immate- Eiseley's The Mind As Nature
rial mind, and others who think that (Harper, 1962), which foreshadowed
a material explanation of the brain the "identity theoryn-the idea that
will finally answer all questions "mind" is simply the sum of what
about man's mental life. goes on in the central nervous sys-
Even good surveys of the field, tem. More detailed treatments of the
such as The Natural History of the emergence of human awareness can
Mind (Button, 1979, cloth; Penguin, be found in Gregory Bateson's Mind
1981, paper), inevitably take sides. and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Dut-
Author Gordon Rattray Taylor leads ton, 1979, cloth; Bantam, 1979, pa-
his audience through the arcane per) and Julian Jaynes's The Origin
mind-matter debate, with engaging of Consciousness in the Breakdown
side trips into anthropology and neu- of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton,
rophysiology. But ultimately he con- 1977, cloth; 1982, paper).
cludes that "the great adventure of The demystification of the mind
exploring the most complex system reached a peak in the branch of psy-
we know of in the universe" will jus- chology that took its name from John
tify faith in an immaterial mind. B. Watson's Behaviorism (People's
Some who share this view are sci- Institute, 1924, cloth; Norton, 1970,
entists. The most ardent dualist in paper). Behavioral psychologists
print today may be the 81-year-old carried Watson's dictum that the
neurobiologist Sir John Eccles, study of human action "needs con-
whose many works include The Self sciousness as little as do the sciences
and Its Brain: An Argument for of chemistry and physics" as far as it
Interactionism (Springer, 1977, would go. The idea that all behavior
cloth; Routledge & Kegan, 1984, pa- could be explained by responses to
per), in collaboration with philoso- pleasure and pain was developed by
pher Sir Karl Popper, and Mind and Harvard's B. F. Skinner into an argu-
Brain (International Cultural Foun- ment that personal liberty and free
dation, 1982). Other dualist argu- will (and thus good and evil) are just
ments are presented in the mathe- illusions. Skinner's Beyond Freedom
matician and philosopher Jacob and Dignity (Knopf, 1971, cloth; Ban-
The Wilson Quarterlyi'Winter 1984

84
BACKGROUND BOOKS: THE MIND
tam, 1972, paper) widened the gulf Golden Braid (Basic, 1979, cloth;
between the behaviorists and schol- Random, 1980, paper). His argu-
ars with more "humanist" ideas. ment, spun out with engaging puz-
Many of cognitive psychology's zles, riddles, and dialogues, is that
contributions to the study of mental the truly perfect thinking machine
operations are outlined in The would, like man, be far from a crea-
Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections ture of cold mathematical logic and
on the Self and Soul (Basic, 198 1 , precision.
cloth; Bantam, 1982, paper) by The computer culture, rather than
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Den- just the computer, is MIT sociologist
net. Jerome Bruner's In Search of Sherry Turkle's interest. In The Sec-
Mind: Essays in Autobiography ond Self: Computers and the Human
(Harper, 1983),offers a broad view of Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 1984), she
what psychology has been able to de- takes a careful look at the rising elec-
termine about such processes as tronics in-group peopled by "hack-
"knowing" and "learning," as well ers" and members of the A1 priest-
as about improving the intellect. hood. She concludes that the debate
Herbert Simon lays out the hopes about "what computers can or can-
for machine-made intelligence in not be made to do ignores what is
Sciences of the Artificial (MIT , 1969, most essential to A1 as a culture:
cloth; 2nd ed., 1981, cloth & paper). building not machines, but a new
Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer paradigm for thinking about people,
Power and Human Reason: From thought, and reality."
Judgment to Calculation (W. H. The question of whether the mind
Freeman, 1976, cloth & paper) and is a machine may never be answered
Hubert L. Dreyfus's What Comput- definitively, and maybe that is just
ers Can't Do (Harper, 1972, cloth; as well. A Yes answer would devalue
1979, paper) suggests some of the our sense of humanity; a No would
limits to artificial intelligence (AI). deny our ability to understand our-
For those still uncomfortable with selves scientifically.
terms such as "parallel architec- Instead, we may be served best by
ture," Pamela McCorduck's Ma- a paradoxical conclusion: Yes, the
chines Who Think (W. H. Freeman, mind is a machine; and No, it is not.
1979, cloth; 1981, paper) is a user- The study of the mind can be ap-
friendly history of AI. Those con- proached profitably in both ways.
vinced enough by information tech- Though this seems contradictory,
nology to suspect that the mind there is an oft-quoted aphorism in
indeed may be a mechanism-and a physics: "The opposite of a shallow
relatively poor one at that-may truth is a falsehood, but the opposite
profit from Hofstadter's exuberant of a profound truth is often another
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal profound truth."
-Susan Baur
EDITOR'S NOTE: Susan Baur, 44, is a graduate student in psychology at Har-

vard. Readers may wish to consult books cited in the preceding essays, as well as
in WQ's previous articles o n The Brain (Summer 1982) and Psychiatry in Amer-
ica (Autumn 1983).
The Wilson Quurterlv/Winler 1984

85
Ever since the New Deal began, the future role of the federal
government in the nation's social and economic life has been a
matter of intense debate, especially at election time. Conserva-
tives have warned of creeping Welfare Statism; populists and
liberals have often envisioned a regime increasingly domi-
nated by Big Business and serving its interests. Both visions
have been wrong. America has not become Sweden, nor has
business ever become a unified, dominating force in Washing-
ton. Under Republicans and Democrats alike, historian Otis L.
Graham, Jr., suggests, the federal system has remained essen-
tially what it became under Franklin D. Roosevelt-the Broker
State. Here, he reflects upon the virtues and flaws of America's
peculiar ad hoc regime and its prospects.
When the Great Depression reached rock bottom in the winter of

1932-33, there were not many American models of a government ade-
quate to deal with the catastrophic economic crisis.
During the 1920s, the State had been responsible for some promo-
tion of agriculture; a scattering of targeted subsidies for emerging in-
dustries such as oil, airlines, radio; a tariff designed to protect
influential business sectors. But federal policy had no significant influ-
ence upon the economy, upon science and technology, let alone upon
the arts, education, health care. The federal budget during the 1920s
never absorbed more than three percent of the gross national product
(GNP), and all government purchases (federal, state, and local) never
surpassed 11 percent.
The "American System," to use Herbert Hoover's phrase, was not
laissez-faire capitalism. Calvin Coolidge did not entirely abandon the
antitrust or regulatory roles inherited from the administrations of
Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. But the State during the
'20s did not merit the labels Regulatory State or Welfare State that
would later be invented.
THE BROKER STATE
A small sampling of America's many interest groups was in evidence at the

Solidarity Day parade in Washington, D.C., on September 19,1981.
Perhaps the only significant public figure to worry about this ad

hoc arrangement was Hoover. As Secretary of Commerce (1921-28) and
as President (1929-33), he labored to design what historians have
called the Associative State. In his view, an activist government should
promote rational economic development through information sharing
and social research, while encouraging private interests to combine in
trade associations. All this was to be accomplished voluntarily. Hoover
did not quite have time to realize his vision of a proper political econo-
my-one in which the State would be far more active than in William
McKinley's day. But Coolidge must be judged wiser, o r at least luckier,
than the innovative Hoover. He pronounced the modestly active and
entirely probusiness government of the prosperous 1920s a perfect in-
stitution, properly married to a cornucopian capitalism. He held the
line against such changes as were urged on him by farmers or by other
social tinkerers, including Hoover. And he went into retirement just
eight months before the Great Crash.
Thus there were no adequate models for the role of government in
the malfunctioning capitalist economy after 1929. Franklin D. Roose-
velt and his New Dealers were interested in strategic ideas to provide
coherence to the torrent of reforms that they pushed in 1933 and after.
Their attempts to introduce forms of national planning during the
1930s are most instructive. Drawing upon the nation's successful expe-
The Wilson Quarierl~IWinter1984

87
T H E BROKER STATE
rience in mobilizing for World War I and upon what would now be
called "corporatism," early New Deal planning efforts stressed
government-business partnerships (with labor a weak third party). In-
stitutionalized in the National Recovery Administration and the Agri-
cultural Adjustment Administration, these partnerships had as their
goal the preservation of existing producer groups and, secondarily, the
protection of consumers through price- (and some wage-) fixing under
federal supervision. How such measures would add up to a general eco-
nomic recovery was never quite clear. And this uncertainty led New
Dealers to contemplate a central federal agency for coordinating di-
verse activities and insuring strategic coherence. The failure of this ef-
fort to create a coordinated national-planning program, which had
considerable business and conservative support for a time, is an inter-
esting story that has been dealt with elsewhere.*
Beginning in 1935, the older liberal faith in breaking up large
corporations-based more on a suspicion of bigness than on confidence
in the beneficial effects of competition-eclipsed the partnership-and-
planning gospel. FDR began to attack Big Business and accumulated
wealth and to stress antimonopoly efforts. To contemporaries, he ap-
peared confused. To recent historians, it seems that he was attempting
a blend of the planning and the free-market traditions within liberal-
ism. The one went back to Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, the
other to Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom. By 1937, FDR aimed at a
planning state that used antitrust as a tool. This was the final New
Deal, requested in 1937-38 through bills establishing presidential plan-
ning, Supreme Court reform, and party realignment.
But FDR was beaten; the real New Deal was rejected. By 1938, the
New Deal momentum was spent, and threats of war in Europe over-
shadowed the domestic agenda. Everybody, including Roosevelt,
agreed to call the new State system "the New Deal." Yet one could
argue that the New Deal that FDR wanted was never put in place. Fed-
eral activity had vastly expanded, but in the haphazard fashion charac-
teristic of American politics. Regulatory assignments were enlarged,
*See, for example, m y book, Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford,
1976).
Otis L. Grakai17, Jr., 49, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is professor of his-
tory at the University ofNorth Carolina,Chapel Hill. Born in Little Rock, Ar-
kansas, he received his B.A. (1957) from Yale University and his Ph.D.
(1966) from Columbia University. He is the author of, among other books,
An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (1966)
and The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900-1928
(1971). This essay is drawn from a longer paper, delivered at a Wilson Center
conference, on "The State since the New Deal." Copyright 0 1984 by Otis L.
Graham, Jr.
THE BROKER STATE
and collective bargaining was enforced; a system of social insurance,

work relief, and welfare measures was instituted; subsidies were
granted to farmers, industries, and regions (the South and the Rocky
Mountain West). The federal share of GNP had tripled, and Washington
was, for the first time, a more important fiscal influence than were
state and local governments combined. But it was not a planning State,
nor a market-restoring State, as earlier liberal theory had projected.
What, then, was the American State's role at the end of the 1930s?
The State had certainly been transformed in size and function, its lead
assignment a de facto (and, after the Employment Act of 1946, a de
jure) responsibility for economic management. But which Americans
were its potential or likely beneficiaries? What would be its direction?
Was it benign or malevolent? Who called the tune?
Several early answers deserve mention. Strident predictions that

the post-New Deal State could not be reconciled with capitalism or lib-
erty came from various conservatives, among them ex-President
Hoover. James Burnham wrote a scolding book in 1949 entitled The
Managerial Revolution, concluding that federal technocrats would run
the country now, not in the interest of the proletariat but in pursuit of
efficiency and their own power. Perhaps Burnham, entering his con-
servative phase, listened too much to some of the New Dealers them-
selves. James M. Landis and other liberal bureaucrats wrote books
celebrating the public administrator's role as social manager. Both
Burnham and Landis were wide of the mark. The State did not take its
cue from the bureaucracy, which was in any event not so benevolent,
malevolent, or efficient as these early premonitions suggested. Nor did
it take its lead from the President, at least not in any sustained way.
The post-New Deal system was a weak-president system, following the
defeat of Roosevelt's 1937-38 plans.
And the goal of the State? It was to remedy the many fundamental
market failures besetting American capitalism-redistributing income
to maintain demand, regulating monopolies that could not be disman-
tled, nurturing economic development in lagging regions, protecting
the environment and natural resources, ensuring the economic security
of all established interest groups, even, parsimoniously, the disadvan-
taged. Thus protected from its own worst tendencies, the capitalist sys-
tem would produce a decent life.
While part of this design conformed to FDR's view of the post-New
Deal State in America, many who shared his goal doubted the system
had even a reasonable hope of success. Some liberals, including Elea-
nor Roosevelt and the Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell expressed doubt
that the presidency itself, the government's medley of powers, and pub-
THE BROKER STATE
lie understanding of it all added up to a workable system. The system

lacked a strong center, a planning presidency. Other voices of dissent
were heard from the Left, dimly. Socialists predicted that the New
State would soon founder and open the way for their own Norman
Thomas, since capitalism could not be stabilized; or, they predicted
that the New Deal system would slide inexorably into fascism (after
that, socialism). Marxists, their criticism of bourgeois reformism un-
dercut by the popularity of the New Deal, produced no coherent anal-
ysis of the emergent post-New Deal State.
The most perceptive contemporary observer, it seems from this

distance, was journalist John Chamberlain, whose The American Stakes
(1940) described a "Broker State" as the outcome of the New Deal ex-
perimentation. Chamberlain correctly saw that the New Deal had
abandoned the early hope of a centrally concerted recovery-and-reform
effort, accepting in its place the role of broker among organized interest
groups. Washington itself had thus become a sort of modified market-
place, a "parallelogram of pressures," a place of exchange where
groups within the economy brought their special problems and bar-
gained for State-conferred advantage. He did not claim that it was a
particularly rational arrangement, but it was democratic in appear-
ance, flexible in goals.
Chamberlain's brokerage government disappeared during the year
after his book appeared, replaced by the planned mobilization of war-
time. The State was hardly the responsive broker from 1942 to 1945; it
had reasonably clear goals of its own to pursue and necessarily made de-
cisions that did not derive simply from interest-group bargaining. But
the wartime centralization ended with the victory of 1945. After a brief
debate over a proposal for peacetime planning as embodied in the origi-
nal Employment Act of 1946, brokerism returned. The post-New Deal
system began its long career, surviving, with modifications, from the ad-
ministration of Harry S Truman to that of Ronald Reagan.
To stress continuity in this way may disturb those who are im-
pressed by the differences in policy when Republicans and Democrats
alternate in the White House. Even more might it affront those who,
looking beyond policy to structure, note changes that have worked
their way into American government since 1945.
These folk have a point. To begin with, the State is much larger
now than it was in 1940. By the early 1970s, government at all levels
claimed about one-third of the GNP for goods, services, and transfer
payments. More important readjustments of power had taken place, of
which we mention only a few. With the rearmament triggered by the
Korean War came a level of spending for national-security purposes

90
THE BROKER STATE
that has built up the most imposing network of power in America-

what Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial complex." Another
structural evolution required longer to mature-the transformation of
intergovernmental relations, of our federalism.
Before the New Deal, state and county governments were generally
antiquated. Large cities struggled with problems unrecognized by the
states. Regional governments were nonexistent. But a surge of federal
grants during the 1930s and again during the 1960s wrought significant
changes, producing a more integrated and effective system. Thanks in
part to "one-man, one-vote" court decisions, state governments, at
least most of them, have become more active and less exclusively
bound to rural interests. To a slightly lesser extent this has happened,
at least in some parts of the nation, to counties. Substate and multi-
state regionalism has made a cautious appearance.
Thus the postwar years have not been a static time for govern-
mental roles or structures. One notes also the wave of the "new social
regulation," which arrived with the late 1960s, adding consumer, work-
place, environmental protection, and "affirmative action" responsibili-
ties to the multilayered State. In Congress we have seen changes in
committee and subcommittee numbers and staffing, and a new budget
process. Money is more important in electioneering than ever before,
reflecting the ability of TV, radio, and direct mail to by-pass older
means of reaching the voter or partisan activist. The federal judiciary
plays a role in policy-making that infuriates those who remember more
deferential judges and more explicit statutes. Federally financed public-
interest lawyers have shifted some influence to the formerly uninfluen-
tial-consumers, the poor. These and other structural changes in the
State were not in place at the end of the 1930s, nor in 1945. Who is to say
that these changes have not given us, even before the election of Presi-
dent Reagan, a new State in a new political economy?
I argue that they have not. Despite changes in ruling party, with
what sounds like sharp shifts of ideology, the continuities are impres-
sive. What might be called the decision of 1932-36 continues to hold:
Self-guiding capitalism abandoned, the State plays a major role in so-
cial management. And what might be called the compromise of
1937-38 has also held: The new Liberal State neither restores markets
nor carries out plans but brokers the requests of interest groups while
using Keynesian tools to stimulate economic growth.
Busy on several fronts, the State has not possessed a clear concep-
tion either of what the national interest requires or of what national
goals ought to be. Moreover, it has lacked any central institution to sur-
vey the social or policy whole. During the last years of the 1970s, as dur-
THE BROKER STATE
ing the 1930s, the State in all its parts made policy in pieces,
incrementally, responding mostly to the pressure of organized interests
and occasionally to its own internal impulses. The State was mammoth
and omnipresent, but agreeable and not inclined toward coercion. The
American government rarely acted to redistribute power or to discipline
private groups, preferring to serve as a mediator and broker delivering
favors in proportion to pressure. As the component parts of the State
dealt with interest groups, an invisible hand presumably orchestrated
the whole of policy toward some public good.
What is the result of this mode of governing, when the "political"
has so much to do with the "economy"? Since the 1930s, there have
been and continue to be claims that "the big capitalists" would control
the State. But the facts have not confirmed this prediction, at least not
in its simple form. In the New Deal days especially, but also thereafter,
the State has responded to noncapitalist groups and even organized
some of them for smoother participation. The New Deal assisted labor
and devised a program for tenant farmers, and the State in recent years
has proven quite receptive to the lobbies of groups one would not ex-
actly call capitalist-environmentalists, rifle owners, the radio listen-
ers of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. As for the capitalists themselves,
their tendency to disagree, as with the steel industry in conflict with
steel users, refutes such simplistic theories of "big capitalist" domina-
tion. And of course the State responds to more than just the Washing-
ton lobbyists; it listens to the pollsters, to the governmental
bureaucracy itself, and to much else.
But typically the American State has responded to interest groups.

Despite the cacophony and frequent irrationality of results, as when the
government both promotes and condemns the production and use of to-
bacco, there is a pattern beneath the confusion. A group or groups de-
velop a grievance, usually an economic one. Congressional hearings are
held to clarify and legitimate the issue, with only the strongly affected
groups appearing. A program is set up, and neither in the legislature at
the program's birth nor during its lifetime in the executive branch is it
scrutinized for its compatibility with other social concerns.
Political scientist Theodore Lowi has called this a condition of
"permanent receivership" in which "any institution large enough to be
a significant factor in the community shall have its existence under-
written" by public authority. Lowi calls this sort of policy-making "un-
intentionally reactionary," but the word conservative is preferable, for
it stresses the tendency to preserve existing arrangements against the
hardships of change whether they come from market forces, technol-
ogy, or even (as with Chrysler, New York City, and now Continental-

92
THE BROKER STATE
Illinois Bank) bad management. Others have used the word

"corporatist" to characterize that strong tendency in the modern State
to blur the distinction between public and private realms by handing
over not just the design but the operation of public programs to repre-
sentatives of certain economic groups. The pursuit of public ends
through private instrumentalities is prevented with great difficulty
from becoming the pursuit of private ends, using public authority but
removing it from public accountability.
Through all this, the State remains, for the most part, neutral. It
entertains no notion of rearranging the society beneath it, and apart
from foreign policy, almost never conceives and pursues some goal it
has not first heard about from some clamoring group of citizens. There
have not been many exceptions, and those usually came through the
courts. Federal judges brought the State to the aid of the American In-
dians, a weak interest group, and launched the epochal drive to bring
legal equality to the black population. One of the things that made Lyn-
don Johnson's War on Poverty so exceptional was that it had not been
conceived by the poor who stood to gain most from it.
Whether fairly distributed or not, a banquet of benefits was spread

by the postwar political economy (the Department of Defense and its
contractors receiving more than a generous share), and leaders of both
parties claimed credit for it. The system was stable by any standards,
including those of our own national history. No radical economic or po-
litical developments interrupted the relatively smooth flow of events.
The broker system was more popular than unpopular. Its critics were
vocal, but ineffective: John Kenneth Galbraith, warning in American
Capitalism (1952) of an inflationary bias in any system that rewarded
all claimants and lacked a basis for discipline; socialists, who did not
like liberal capitalism; Barry Goldwater; various right-wing extrem-
ists; academic writers who pointed out that interest-group bargaining
tended to leave out the poor, the consumer, the unborn, and the envi-
ronment. These critics could not get the system changed.
Equally ineffective was another group of critics of considerably
more power-sitting presidents of the United States. From Eisenhower
to Carter, without exception, they left a record of formally and infor-
mally expressed frustration. Assuming FDR's stance, that the president
was the people's only elected voice, they each had carried what they (at
least) knew to be majoritarian, national programs into the minefields
of the Broker State. Save only for LBJ, and then only for two years, each
had been substantially blocked. "There are more impediments to our
success than we had imagined," conceded John F. Kennedy. "Govern-
ment doesn't work," Richard M. Nixon scrawled on the margin of a

93
THE BROKER STATE
speech draft by William Safire.

This perception of governmental impotence was shared by many in
the academic and public-administration fields. Political scientist
James M. Burns called it Deadlock of Democracy in his 1963 book,
stressing both the electoral and the governmental sources of a system
that resisted policy redirection. Parties had lost their 19th-century
vigor, Congress had weakened its leadership and multiplied its com-
mittee fiefdoms, the presidency was ill organized for domestic manage-
ment. Many critics noted that it seemed to require crisis to move the
deadlocked postwar system-a thalidomide tragedy, a Santa Barbara
oil spill. What Henry C. Hart, another political scientist, wrote about
water policy could stand for all policy: "General interests are asleep, to
be awakened only by floods and droughts, by catastrophe."
A series of writers specialized in describing and deploring the thick

minefield of Madisonian checks: congressional committees, iron trian-
gles, the permanent government. This, at least, was the preferred im-
agery of liberals, who stressed the veto design of governmental
structure. More conservative observers saw paralysis in another way,
preferring the image of "overload," a system swollen to immobility as a
result of having taken on too much.
These perceptions of the State, while not unheard over the earlier
years during which the system was in place, reached a new intensity as
the 1970s advanced. The 1970s brought problems that the system did
not handle well. During the boom era, roughly from wartime demobili-
zation to the recession of 1970, growth had underwritten the system.
For a number of still-disputed reasons, the growth curve slowed and
then flattened in the 1970s, as inflation and stagnation became compat-
ible and gradually lowered the American standard of living. Productiv-
ity increases disappeared, and foreign competition began to cut deeply
into formerly invulnerable American industries-auto, steel, machine
tools, electronics.
Journalists, politicians and some academics wrote about "the de-
cline of America," and many of them, regardless of party, found the er-
rors of the State to be contributing causes. The Republican version of
this State criticism blamed overregulation, overspending, and over-
taxing: old ideas with little analytical but much political merit. The
Democratic version of the State-based explanation of the troubles of
the late-1970s economy came to be called neoliberalism, and stressed
the inability of interest-group liberalism to permit a shift of economic
resources from old industrial regions to new.
The complaints of the late 1970s were, by far, the most serious.
They came not only from its enemies but from its friends. Joseph Cali-

94
THE BROKER STATE
fano, Lyndon Johnson's White House aide and Jimmy Carter's Secre-
tary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), wrote in 1978:
Power is fragmented in Washington these days, not just within

the executive branch, but by legislative mandates within HEW
itself. . . . Political party discipline has been shattered by the
rise of special-interest politics in the nation's capital. Washing-
ton has become a city of political molecules, with fragmenta-
tion of power, and often authority and responsibility, among
increasingly narrow, what's-in-it-for-me interest groups. . . .
If there is an underlying crisis of the State, as so many are saying, it

was visible in 1978, well before the election of a man whose domestic
model, in liberals' eyes, is the government and America of Calvin Coo-
lidge. Carter's presidency began auspiciously with promises of compe-
tence, awareness of limits upon the welfare mission, and healthy
suspicion of official Washington's errors. Some saw in him a new leader
with a more disciplined conception of the basic liberal agenda, repre-
senting an opening to long-excluded groups and regions. But by 1978
his popularity had peaked, and the political pundits were writing about
another failed presidency.
Historians are likely to improve upon the voters' verdict, citing, on
the positive side, Carter's impressive environmental record, his attack
upon a range of social and governmental problems, and his struggle to
base U.S. foreign policy on some conception other than anti-Sovietism.
More important in revising our understanding of the Carter era
will be a broader perspective on the evolution within all Western politi-
cal economies during the 1970s. England, Finland, Sweden, and Swit-
zerland were among the countries that experienced revolts from the
Right (and Center) against rising taxes and welfare expenditures. Rea-
gan brought that middle-class revolt to the front of U.S. politics some-
what late by European standards, though Barry Goldwater, George
Wallace, and, in their way, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown were har-
bingers of what was coming.
The change of direction initiated by the election of Mr. Reagan is yet
incomplete, too close for clear appraisal. But even early inspection reveals
that the promised revolution-which was to include at least a partial dis-
mantling of the New Deal-has not quite occurred. Budget cuts capped
the growth, but did not threaten the existence, of welfare programs; nor
did they touch middle-class social-insurance entitlements such as Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The rest of the "supply-side" experi-
ment was botched by the administration or compromised by congres-
sional opposition. The tax cut lacked economic rationality, enriching
mostly the already rich. Deregulation went slowly, except in the environ-
mental field, and the new federalism went almost nowhere.
THE BROKER STATE
As it stands now, changes in tone and agenda are considerable, but

the Broker-Regulatory-Welfare State still presides. Tax and regulatory
policies have been tilted more strongly toward the owners of capital,
social-welfare policy has become slightly more astringent, military in-
terests have fattened, the growth of the State sector has leveled off.
These changes would never have brought recovery in 1983-84 without
a mounting deficit, and the deficit, of course, is a time bomb.
Not Reagan policies but the last remission of the energy crisis
brought a reprieve from that major source of inflation and other eco-
nomic trouble.
In short, this is an uncertain time, almost certainly not leading
back to the happy hands-off days of the '20s. For the last decade at least,
there has been a remarkable outpouring of ideas suggesting how to fix
our erratic State. Should Reaganism falter, the planning idea will
doubtless come forward again, as it did during the 1930s and again (as
with the Humphrey-Javits, then Humphrey-Hawkins employment
bills) during the 1970s.
This time there will be a difference. Planning is called Industrial

Policy (IP). Though IP has many forms and advocates, most formula-
tions respect market forces, disavow "the rigidities of national eco-
nomic planning," and aim at cooperative government-capital-labor
mechanisms to restructure failing industries or equip new industries
for international competition, or both. Every Democratic candidate for
president in 1984 went on record in favor of some version of IP.
When things begin to go awry, it is a good rule to ask if one is pos-
ing the right questions. Perhaps the problems of the contemporary
American State are not internal, matters of design and mission, but
also and primarily outside, in some social pathology or maladjust-
ment? Many have thought so. Jimmy Carter told the public that a
"malaise" of the American spirit was at the root of government troub-
les. That his case was not convincing does not discredit the idea.
Consider the centrifugal forces at work: political parties continuing
to weaken, voters disaffiliating, and legislators taking increasingly inde-
pendent and unpredictable positions. The family has splintered vari-
ously into divorced, remarried, and live-in units. Racial, ethnic, sexual,
and religious groups have become ever more assertive of prerogatives en-
dorsed or hinted at during the civil-rights era. Large-scale immigration
began during the late 1960s, almost all of it from the Third World, bring-
ing fresh recruits, numbering more than one million a year, to swell
America's economically and socially isolated underclass.
Our 19th-century forebears would tell us that Americans have always
been a heterogeneous, fractious people, insufficiently united by common
THE BROKER STATE
values or purpose. But the last third of the 20th century appears to be the
time of the unraveling of even the earlier social and civic ties that eased the
task of governing. An old theme in our political discourse seems now more
pressing: the articulation of a national purpose.
Earlier efforts to supply national direction have merely demon-
strated the difficulties-the pieties contained in the report of Dwight D.
Eisenhower's Presidential Commission on National Goals (1960),
Nixon's "lift of a driving dream." Still the efforts continue. Reagan
reaches backward to the individualistic materialism of the 1920s, the
"American dream," and joins this with the nation's unifying antipathy
toward the Soviet adversary.
The vision of some of his critics has stressed the inclusion of the for-
merly excluded; they struggle to offer a sense of social purpose other
than the eternal and hazardous arms race with Moscow. But the Demo-
crats, too, now talk of "economic growth" as the central American goal,
without commencing the painstaking effort of showing how such
growth may continue without the limitless population growth that un-
dermines all gains.
An alternate vision lies in the direction of what Worldwatch Insti-
tute's Lester Brown calls a "sustainable society," or what Franklin
Roosevelt once termed "a permanent . . . national life," requiring popu-
lation stabilization and profound changes in people's attitudes toward
resources, the biosphere, and self-fulfillment. Much work remains to be
done by its advocates to make that vision clearer, more compelling, free
of the taint of stagnation.
A populist Democrat might say that what is needed is the time to
allow a new sense of national direction to build from below. But leaders
understandably think that they must lead, and will be sorely tempted,
if matters worsen, to substitute a national purpose more familiar and
binding than either individual enrichment or some obscure Buddhist
economics of stability and redistribution. That might well someday be
war, since we have not yet invented its moral equivalent.
The underlying crisis of the Broker State, when the center does not
hold, reflects a social loosening beneath the apparatus and daily per-
formance of government. We "have lost our core project," to use sociol-
ogist Amitai Etzioni's words, a condition for which the State possesses
only dangerous remedies. Thus, whatever our present difficulties, there
may be worse trials ahead for this elderly, dear republic.
Detail from a late 17th-century religious triptych. The Virgin Mary is
especially venerated by Ethiopian Coptic Christians, who believe her
to be not only the mother ofJesus Christ but also o f God the Father.

98
"Revolutionary Ethiopia or death" was the choice offered to
Ethiopians by their chief of state, Mengistu Haile Mariam, last
September, on the 10th anniversary of the revolution that
ended the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Such rhetoric is not
unusual in postcolonial Africa, known for its cycles of coups
and countercoups. But Ethiopia is different. The revolution
ended a monarchy that had ruled an independent Ethiopia for
almost 2,000 years. Dissatisfied with the pace of change under
Haile Selassie, Mengistu and his associates have tried to forge
a modern Marxist state overnight. Using terror and coercion,
they have met with no great success. Why? Here, Paul Henze
suggests that history may offer some explanations.
by Paul B. Henze
Addis Ababa (New Flower) takes the airborne traveler by sur-

prise. Coming in from the north, one flies first up the narrow,
green Egyptian valley of the Nile, then over the barren Nubian
Desert in the Sudan. Across the Ethiopian border, the desert rises
to a high plateau, broken by deep gorges. On the plateau is a
patchwork of grain fields and thatched-roof farmsteads that con-
tinues for hundreds of miles. Its pastoral character gives little
hint that a city of 1.3 million inhabitants is nearby, just over the
Entoto mountain range, with its 11,000-foot heights clothed in
dark cedar and eucalyptus. As the jetliner crosses the highest
ridge, there, out of nowhere, appears Ethiopia's capital.
Ramshackle shanties with tin roofs spread out on the lower
slopes; clusters of modern concrete-and-glass buildings anchor
the city center, laced by broad avenues that dwindle into
twisting dirt paths on the outskirts.
Little would seem to have changed during the last 10 years.
The cool, thin mountain air-at over 8,000 feet, Addis Ababa is
the highest city in Africa-still carries the scent of the eucalyp-
tus groves scattered throughout the city. Street boys and beg-
gars continue to jostle pedestrians on Churchill Avenue, which
connects the railway station and city hall. Hawkers in the Mer-

99
ETHIOPIA
cato-a vast market built during the 1935-41 Italian occupa-

tion-peddle crosses and icons to tourists. Old men wearing a
sort of jodphurs and the shamma, a white cotton toga, still bow
toward the National Palace as they did during the times of Em-
peror Haile Selassie.
But inside the palace there is no longer an emperor. And here
and there in Addis Ababa is evidence of the 1974 revolution that
saw Haile Selassie's 44-year rule ended by a group of soldiers
known as the Derg-the word for "committee" in Ge'ez, the an-
cient Semitic tongue still used by Ethiopia's Orthodox priests.
Haile Selassie's National Palace is today the site of the annual
Revolution Day (September 12) reception. A 12-foot-highstatue of
Lenin stands between the palace and Africa Hall, headquarters of
the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Revolution
Square, formerly Holy Cross Square, boasts a new pink granite
sculpture of Karl Marx. Above, giant portraits of Lenin, Marx, and
Engels-floodlit at night-beam down approvingly.
Even so, the trappings of socialism have not changed the char-
acter of the capital; everything there, as novelist Evelyn Waugh
noted in 1930, is "haphazard and incongruous." High-rise apart-
ments loom over back yards crowded with chickens and goats.
Donkeys laden with firewood trot down Entoto Avenue among Fiat
automobiles, Honda motor scooters, and Mercedes buses.
For the privileged, the Hilton Hotel has remained the social
center of the capital. Government officials, American and Ger-
man businessmen, and diplomats of various nationalities gather
around its swimming pool, enjoying the view the hotel affords of
the city. Revolution or no revolution, Addis Ababa is still the
'Capital of Africa": a designation it has earned as the site of 68
embassies, several United Nations offices, and the headquarters
of the Organization of African Unity, over whose establishment
Haile Selassie presided in 1963.
One begins to wonder: How has the 1974 revolution affected
Ethiopia? The Derg promised equality, political freedom, and
rapid economic development. Land reform, introduced immedi-
ately, has undoubtedly made many of Ethiopia's 32.9 million
citizens more equal. New schools and expanded rural health ser-
vices have improved life in much of the country.
But Ethiopians enjoy no political freedom. All opposition is
Paul B. Henze, 60, a former Wilson Center Fellow', served at the U.S. enzbassy in
Addis Ababa from 1969 to 1972 and was on the National Security Council from
1977 to 1980. Born in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, he received a B.A. from Saint
Olaf College (1948) and an M.A. from Harvard (1950).He is author of Ethio-
pian Journeys (1977)and Russians and the Horn (1983).
ETHIOPIA
ETHIOPIA
The economy, instead of expanding under "revolutionary

socialism," has stagnated. With an annual income per capita of
$140, Ethiopia remains one of the world's poorest nations. In-
dustry is embryonic-cement is one of Ethiopia's few nonagri-
cultural products-and industrial output grew by only two
percent last year, versus eight percent a year during the 1960s.
Agriculture accounted for almost half of Ethiopia's estimated
1982 gross domestic product, and for 90 percent of the nation's
exports (mostly coffee and hides). Almost anything can be grown
in Ethiopia; it is the potential breadbasket of Africa. But land re-
form has brought no surge in productivity. A drought in the
northern highlands-as severe as the one that Haile Selassie
tried to ignore in 1973-has left many Ethiopians struggling
just to feed themselves. The average Ethiopian born today will
live to the age of 46. Even a citizen of Bangladesh can expect to
live three years longer.
The resources that might have been used to improve agri-
culture or to build factories instead support a 250,000-man
army, Africa's third largest. Backed by the Russians, the Ethio-
pians defeated the invading Somalis in a 1977 war for control of
the Ogaden region in the south. But rebels in the northern prov-
inces of Eritrea, Tigre, and Gonder still confront the government
with what Chairman Mengistu has labeled "a life-or-death
struggle to safeguard . . . our revolutionary motherland." Mili-
tary spending consumed some 10 percent of the 1982 budget,
and the civil wars show no signs of abating.
Lesser peoples might have disintegrated in the face of such
pressures. But 2,500 years of recorded history attest to the
staying power of Ethiopian culture, a culture protected by a re-
mote and rugged geography, nurtured by an ancient religion,
and preserved by a resilient highland race.
If history were like petroleum, extracted from the earth and

refined for profit, Ethiopia would be one of the richest countries
in the world. Its "proven reserves" are great and the probability
of further extensive finds is high. Two hundred miles northeast
of Addis Ababa, a parched lake-bed in the Afar Triangle has
yielded one of the oldest collections of near human ancestors.
Here, in 1974, the American paleontologist Donald Johanson

102
ETHIOPIA
came upon the three-million-year-old remains of a female homi-

nid who died in her twenties. Subsequent discoveries by Johan-
son and others led to the designation of a new forebear of
modern man, Australopithecus afarensis.
Most of the major paleontological finds in Ethiopia are lo-
cated within or near the Great Rift Valley-the "cradle," many
paleontologists believe, of ancient man. Stretching from Mo-
zambique through the Red Sea to Israel, the valley bisects
Ethiopia diagonally, like a crack in a plate.
The two "halves" of the plate are the Eastern and Western
highlands. Together, the highlands account for almost two-thirds
of Ethiopia's territory. In the east, they slope down through grass-
lands and desert to the Somali border. In the west, the descent is
less gradual, dropping off through deep gorges into the Sudan. The
Ethiopian portion of the Rift Valley begins at Lake Turkana and
continues as a string of lakes until it widens in the northeast to
form the Danakil Depression, the lowest point in Africa and one of
the hottest areas in the world-a lunar-like wasteland where tem-
peratures commonly rise above 130 degrees.
Christianity Plus
Not far beyond the Danakil Depression lies the Red Sea, on
whose shores Ethiopia's recorded history begins. Egyptian texts
chronicle voyages to the "Land of Punt," somewhere in the Horn
of Africa, around 2300 B.C. The works of Homer contain no fewer
than five references to Ethiopia, which he described in the Odys-
sey as "at Earth's two verges, in sunset lands and lands of the
rising sun." The name Ethiopia itself is Greek, meaning "coun-
try of people with burnt faces."
Legend, in many cases, does double duty as history. Scat-
tered references to Ethiopia occur in the Old Testament, includ-
ing the tale of the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon. The
Kebra Nagast (The glory of kings), an Ethiopian epic of the 14th
century A.D., formalized the story. According to this version, Sol-
omon seduced the Queen, who later gave birth to a son, Menelik I.
Thus began the so-called Solomonic Dynasty that would rule
Ethiopia until Haile Selassie's fall in 1974.
Where did the Ethiopians come from? Many historians
believe that Arab colonists crossed the Red Sea from Yemen
during the first millenium B.C. and established a powerful
state at Axum, in the present-day Ethiopian province of Tigre.
Ethiopians still proudly point to their Semitic light skin, thin
lips and noses, and wavy hair; dark skin is disdained-so
much so that Derg chairman Mengistu's dark complexion is
The Wilson Q ~ ~ a r ~ e r l y W i n1984

ter
103
ETHIOPIA
lightened in official photographs.

Huge stone obelisks, deep underground tombs, and large
reservoirs (one popularly called the Queen of Sheba's bath) still
attest to Axum's ancient glory. When emissaries from Axum vis-
ited the Roman emperor Diocletian during the third century
A.D., they did so, in the words of the Latin writer Heliodorus,
"not as tributaries but [as] friends and allies."
For later generations of Ethiopians, the most important de-
velopment in Axum's long history-extending from roughly 500
B.C. to A . D . 900-was the fourth-century conversion of its inhabi-
tants from Judaism and paganism to Christianity.
The first evidence of Christianity dates from the reign of the
emperor Ezana, who ruled from approximately 325 to 355 A.D. One
of his inscriptions, written in Greek, commemorates a campaign
against the Nuba (in central Sudan) and attributes his success to
the "faith of God and the power of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Ghost." The new religion gained ground with the arrival of
the so-called Nine Syrian Saints at the end of the fifth century. The
holy men founded churches and monasteries throughout northern
Ethiopia and translated the Scriptures into Ge'ez.
By the sixth century A.D., Christianity was entrenched in the
Seeking incense and spices, the pharaohs sent fleets to the Land of Punt,
described in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Night as "close to the Land
of Outnet and the Eastern Sea."
The Wil.so11Quanerlv/Wii~ier1984
104
ETHIOPIA
northeastern portion of the kingdom and slowly spreading

south. The new religion's adaptability eased its popular accept-
ance. Tied closely to Egypt's Coptic Christian Church, the Ethio-
pian Orthodox Church also incorporated elements of Judaism
and paganism that persist today. The ritual of circumcision
takes place on the eighth day after birth-the same as in Juda-
ism. Ethiopian Christians do not eat pork. Widespread still is
use of the pagan lelafa sedeq, a parchment scroll tied to the body
at death in order to guide it on the way to heaven.
An African Rarity
The Orthodox Church came to exert an overwhelming influ-
ence on everyday life in Ethiopia. Pilgrimages to sacred springs,
lakes, and caves attracted large crowds. Holy days mandating
fasts were, and are, strictly observed. Peasants even now refer to
days by their corresponding saint's name rather than by their
number. The 23rd of each month, for example, is known as
Giyorgis, after Saint George, Ethiopia's patron saint.;' Monas-
teries such as the one at Debra Libanos, established during the
13th century, were centers of learning and literacy.
While the titular patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church was always an Egyptian appointed by the Patriarch of
Alexandria (a practice that persisted until 1959), native Ethio-
pian monastic leaders wielded the real power. Emperors were
both sovereigns of the nation and defenders of a faith-a status
reflected in one of Haile Selassie's titles: Elect of God. Emperors
such as Zara Yakob (1434-68) enforced orthodoxy. During his
reign, he not only expanded the empire's boundaries but also re-
formed the church, putting to death his own sons for flirting
with paganism.
The gravest threat to Ethiopian Christianity was Islam,
which developed across the Red Sea in Arabia during the sev-
enth century. Early Muslims, persecuted in Arabia, took refuge
in Axum. The prophet Mohammed appreciated this hospitality
and reputedly cautioned his followers, "Leave the Abyssinians
in peace, as long as they do not take the offensive."
But Mohammed's injunction did not stop Arab Muslims
from gradually populating the Red Sea coast. They soon overran
Egypt, the Sudan, and a large portion of what is now Somalia.
Eventually, they would sweep across North Africa and up into
*The Ethiopian calendar has 365 days distributed over 12 months of 30 days each; an addi-
tional month with five (or, in a leap year, six) days occurs at the end of each year. Because it
is based on the Julian rather than the Gregorian scheme, the Ethiopian calendar is also
eight years behind ours.
ETHIOPIA
mingled with the peoples already there and, over generations,

became the Amhara. They and the more northerly Tigreans re-
main the country's two most important Semitic peoples.
Smaller tribes also lived on the plateau, some, like the Falashas,
retaining their identity to this day, others mixing with the
Amhara and Tigreans.
Life in the central highlands mirrored, in some respects, the
feudal pattern of medieval Europe. Most of the high plains and
ambas had come under the (wooden) plow; the fertile soil sup-
ported wheat, barley, and teff, an indigenous grain used to make
injera, the spongy, flat bread eaten by all Ethiopians. The inhab-
itants of scattered settlements gathered weekly at markets and
rural churches to trade, worship, gossip, and drink.
Distinct social classes evolved, from slaves to nobles. Peas-
ants who tilled their own land ranked near the top. Potters, me-
talsmiths, and tanners ranked near the slaves. The emperor
rewarded loyalty with titles and military rank, a practice that
resulted in considerable social mobility.
Thus, by the 15th century, society in the central highlands of
Ethiopia-unlike that in other regions of black Africa-
amounted to far more than a conglomeration of primitive, illiter-
ate tribes. Anchored by a church and an established monarchy
and supported by well-developed agricultural communities,
Ethiopia had developed a solid cultural and political identity as a
nation. While from time to time Ethiopian society incorporated
customs from the tribes it absorbed, the integrity of its basic in-
stitutions remained. Historian Margery Perham has compared
Ethiopia to "a rock-pool high up on the [sealshore . . . filled at in-
tervals by the tide of influence from the great world."
Newcomers
Events during the 16th century unleashed a wave of foreign
influences that severely tested the durability and resilience of
Ethiopian civilization. The first convulsion came in 1529, when
Ahmad Graii ("the Left-handed"), emir of Harer, led a Muslim
expedition into Ethiopia from Harer in the east. He laid waste to
the highlands, forcibly converting Christians and burning
churches and monasteries.
Emergency help came from an entirely unexpected source:
the Portuguese. Intrigued by reports of a mysterious kingdom in
the Near East, supposedly ruled by a Christian king named Pres-
ter John, King John I1 of Portugal had sent an envoy in 1487 to
find this mythical land. The envoy, Pedro de Covilham, arrived
in Ethiopia in 1493, becoming a trusted adviser to the emperor.
The Wilson Quurierlv/Wmier 1984

107
ETHIOPIA
ETHIOPIA'S BLACK JEWS
In 1973, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yossef, declared the
Falashas of Ethiopia to be descended from the lost Hebrew tribe of Dan.
By acknowledging Ethiopia's 30,000 "black Jews" to be, in fact, real
Jews, Yossef ended a century-long debate among rabbinical scholars
and opened the door for Falasha immigration to Israel under the 1950
Law of Return, which offers Israeli citizenship to all Jews.
The origins of the Falashas-the name means "exile" in Amhar-
ic-are obscure. The Falashas themselves claim descent from the
Jewish companions of Emperor Menelik I, reputed son of Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba. Scholars trace the Falashas back to the
Agau, one of the earliest known tribes in Ethiopia. By their reckon-
ing, Judaism was imported during the first millenium B.C. either by
Arabian Jews from across the Red Sea, or by Egyptian Jews travel-
ing south along the Nile.
The Falashas lived autonomously in the Semien Mountains near
Lake Tana for almost 1,000 years. A visiting Spaniard noted during
the 12th century that they were "not subject to the rule of others,
and they have towns and fortresses on the top of mountains." But
400 years later, the Emperor Susenyos conquered the Falashas.
Those who were not sold as slaves were denied the right to own land
and forced to enter the lowly professions of potter, blacksmith,
stonemason, and silversmith.
Help came during the 19th and 20th centuries, from European
Jews. In 1924, a French Jew, Jacques Faitlovitch, opened Ethio-
pia's first Jewish boarding school (in Addis Ababa). But foreign aid
could not overcome the long hostility between Falashas and Chris-
tians. As late as the 1950s, Christian peasants occasionally beat or
killed Falashas, whom they believed turned into hyenas at night
and dug up the dead.
Falashas sought aid from Israel after its creation in 1948. An open
letter to Jewish organizations from the Falashas asked, "Why should
our tribe be considered less than the rest of Jewry?" But the Israelis
were loath to pressure Haile Selassie-one of Israel's few African
allies-into allowing the Falashas to leave. For his part, the Em-
peror saw the Falashas as valuable physical evidence of his own de-
scent from Solomon.
After the 1974 revolution, the Derg allowed some Falashas to emi-
grate (in return for Israeli small arms). But pressure from Ethiopia's
Arab allies, notably Libya, soon curbed the exodus. Life in Israel has
not been easy for the Falashas, who retain their old customs;
women, for example, are confined to special huts during menstrua-
tion. Unable to speak Hebrew and unfamiliar with modern ways,
many of the 5,000 emigres are poverty-stricken. While the Falashas
in Israel may have escaped the hardships of life in Ethiopia, they
have yet to find the Promised Land.
The Wilson Quarterly/IVi~z;er1984

108
ETHIOPIA
Other Portuguese followed. Unable to stop Grafi's depredations,

the Ethiopians turned to Portugal for help. Four hundred Portu-
guese musketeers proved decisive in gaining a 1543 victory
against the Muslim invaders. Thus began Europe's involvement,
of sorts, in Ethiopian affairs.
The Arabian Muslims and the Portuguese were not the only
newcomers to Ethiopia. Exhausted by the struggle against Gran,
the Amhara-Tigre elite could not check a massive influx of Oromo
tribesmen into Ethiopia's heartland. These nomadic cattle herd-
ers migrated from the grazing lands of southern Ethiopia and
northern Kenya during the 16th century. Some Oromo put down
roots and became farmers, embracing Christianity and intermar-
rying with Amhara. Others resisted assimilation. Their leaders
became a major force in regional politics. Today, the Oromo are
the largest ethnic group in the Ethiopian population.
The Ambitions of Tewodros I1

Reeling from the consequences of the Muslim invasion, the
Ethiopian monarchy's power and prestige declined during the
17th and 18th centuries. The peripheral provinces of the empire
slipped away. A steady succession of explorers and emissaries
from Italy, Britain, Spain, Sweden, and France made their way
to Ethiopia, intent on planting their flags. The country seemed
destined to dissolve or to become yet another European protec-
torate. But this did not happen.
Traditionally, change in Ethiopia has come in bursts, with
great men playing a catalytic role. Under Ezana, Axum ex-
panded and embraced Christianity. During the 15th century,
Zara Yakob crushed the Muslims and reformed both church and
state. Now, beginning in the mid-19th century, three ambitious
rulers would follow one upon another, each determined to unite
and modernize a fragmented and feudal empire.
The first, Tewodros 11, ascended the throne in 1855. Walter
Plowden, the British consul at the time, described him as "vig-
orous in all manly exercises . . . his personal and moral daring
are boundless." Such aualities enabled Tewodros to subdue
local chieftains and to restore a strong central government.
Meanwhile, he sought European help to develop his country's
economy and, in the form of guns and gunsmiths, to counter the
Muslims on his borders. He even proposed to the Russian tsar
Alexander I1 that Ethiopia and Russia combine forces to liberate
Jerusalem.
Ultimately, however, Tewodros's impatience and ambi-
tion-and his concern for Ethiopia's cultural integrity-led to his
ETHIOPIA
undoing. In 1862, when European missionaries tried to convert

members of the Jewish Falashas, Tewodros ordered the clerics
imprisoned. The British consul joined them in jail when he pro-
tested. News of the hostages caused an uproar in Britain. Led by
Lt. Gen. Sir Robert Napier, an expeditionary force of 64,000 men,
44 elephants, and some 12,000 mules arrived at Tewodros's
mountain fortress of Magdala in April 1868. After a disastrous de-
feat by the British, the emperor released his prisoners. Intent on
making an example of the upstart emperor, the British then
stormed the citadel; they found Tewodros sprawled on the
ground, a gaping wound in the back of his head. Next to his body
lay a pistol inscribed to him in happier days by Queen Victoria.
Triumph at Adowa
The British did not stay on. Indeed, disenchanted with the
high cost of the expedition, and seeing no economic or strategic
opportunities, they took care, as General Napier later put it, to
remove "every possible official channel through which we
might be involved in [future] complications with that country."
Ethiopia remained-unlike Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan-
free of foreign domination.
By the 1890s, Emperor Menelik 11-who had been a rival
and former prisoner of Tewodros-had realized Tewodros's
dream of a united Ethiopian empire. He conquered the Muslim
city of Harer and subjugated both the southern Oromo and the
inhabitants of the southwestern coffee-growing region of Kefa
(whence comes the English word for coffee). The lowland ne-
groid tribes of the far west-long regarded by highlanders as
shankallas, the Amharic equivalent of "niggers"-were also
brought into the fold.
Menelik next had to face foreigners determined to establish
themselves in Ethiopia. In 1885, the Italians-newcomers in the
Scramble for Africa-occupied the Red Sea port of Massawa
and then advanced into Ethiopia's northern highlands, taking
possession of a region that they christened Eritrea. Talks be-
tween the emperor and the Italians failed. Menelik mobilized
his tribesmen, declaring: "Today, you who are strong, give me
your strength, and you who are weak, help me by prayer."
In March 1896, superior Ethiopian strength crushed the
Italians in the rocky terrain near the village of Adowa. One-third
of General Oreste Baratieri's 18,000 Italians perished. With the
help of Russian advisers and European arms (including 10,000
Italian rifles) Menelik's forces had achieved a victory that
stunned Europe. Adowa Day, March 2, has been celebrated since

110
ETHIOPIA
by Ethiopians as a national holiday. Menelik then made peace

with the Italians, permitting them to keep Eritrea, which for the
next half century insulated Ethiopia from the Muslim regions to
the north and west.
France, Britain, and Italy now treated Menelik with respect.
When the Somali coast bordering Ethiopia was divided among
them, Ethiopia received its interior-the Ogaden. (In this divi-
sion lay the seeds of discord between Ethiopia and modern So-
malia, which became independent in 1960.) The Great Powers
also sent foreign legations to Menelik's capital of Addis Ababa,
founded in 1886. Guided by advisers such as Alfred Ilg, a Swiss
engineer who became one of Menelik's most trusted counselors,
Menelik built the nation's first public school and introduced
smallpox vaccination. In 1905, with the help of European finan-
ciers, the state's Bank of Abyssinia opened for business. The
Russian Red Cross founded Addis Ababa's first hospital.
Unfortunately, a series of strokes crippled Menelik before he
could further his ambitious plans. Lij lyasu, his grandson, fol-
lowed him on the throne in 1913. The young man soon became
involved in Muslim intrigues. The nobility and clergy accused
him of abandoning Christianity and rebelled. In 1916, Menelik's
daughter Zauditu became empress. Under her as prince regent
was Ras Tafari Makonnen, a young man who had a clear vision
for his country.
Ras Tafari Makonnen-who would take the name Haile Selas-

sie ("Power of the Trinity") at his coronation-dominated Ethio-
pia for 58 years. He was born near the city of Harer, where his
father, Menelik's most trusted general, was governor. Tafari
studied in Harer under a Jesuit priest, learning both European his-
tory and French. His father, who had traveled to Europe in 1889,
taught the young Tafari to appreciate the importance of modern
technology as well as Western political and social ideals.
The young prince regent's slight physique and lack of cha-
risma invited the scorn of many of his countrymen-at first. But
his quiet demeanor masked a keen mind and an iron will. "Do
not underestimate . . . Tafari," an unsuccessful rival once ob-
served, "He creeps like a mouse, but he has jaws like a lion."
Tafari's attempts to modernize Ethiopia faced formidable
obstacles. The apparatus of the government in Addis Ababa was
The Wilson QuarlerlyIWinter 1984

111
ETHIOPIA
rudimentary. What education there was took place primarily in

church schools. The country had few roads. Transport was
mostly by mule, horse, or camel. Salt bars still served as cur-
rency. The throne and the church together owned one-third of
the land, and subsistence agriculture allowed the export of only
coffee and hides. Slavery thrived in remote parts of the country.
In their African colonies, the European powers variously as-
sumed the "white man's burden" of economic development.
Ethiopia had to do it alone. Today, in the age of the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, and the Food and Agricultural
Organization, it is easy to forget the scarcity of capital and ex-
pert advice that prevailed in the undeveloped world 50 years
ago. Measured with that in mind, Ethiopia's gains under the
Lion of Judah were substantial.
To attract aid and to ensure protection, Tafari cultivated
strong ties with the outer world. In 1923,after promising to sup-
press slavery, Ethiopia won admission to the League of Nations.
Among other innovations, a chapter of Ethiopian Boy Scouts
was begun. American Presbyterian missionaries established a
160-bed hospital at Addis Ababa in 1923. A contingent of Bel-
gians trained and armed the police.
Haile Selassie I ,
seen shortly after
his coronation
in 1930.
The Wilson Q u a n e ~ I W i n i e 1984

r
112
ETHIOPIA
On a 1924 tour of Europe, the young prince regent struck

the London Times as a man "of considerable enlightenment."
Others were impressed by his large entourage, which included a
private traveling zoo with lions. Tafari returned with ideas for
change at home; he also dispatched bright young Ethiopians to
universities in England, France, and the United States.
But Tafari had to move slowlv. Radical chancre he knew,
would alienate the conservative clergy and rural tribal aristoc-
racy, and could lead to his downfall. "Ethiopia is like Sleeping
Beauty," Tafari told a French journalist in 1933. "We must take
great care . . . not to overwhelm her with changes."
Mussolini's Revenge
With the death of Empress Zauditu in 1930, Tafari became
Emperor Haile Selassie I, riding to his coronation in a carriage
that had once belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm I. His coronation il-
lustrated vividly the gulf between the promise and the reality of
modernity in his nation. Policemen obligingly donned new uni-
forms for the ceremony, but they refused to wear shoes. Lepers
and beggars were hastily evacuated from Addis Ababa to hide
them from the eyes of foreign dignitaries-a practice still fol-
lowed in revolutionary Ethiopia.
Still, genuine improvements did take place. In 1931, the
new emperor gave his countrymen a constitution that estab-
lished a two-chamber parliament. The emperor retained real
power, but the constitution helped to weaken Ethiopia's feudal
array of warring tribal chieftains. To establish a civil service,
Haile Selassie recruited advisers from Sweden, Switzerland,
and the United States-countries with no territorial interests in
Ethiopia. (One American, a former U.S. Treasury employee
named Everett A. Colson, served as Haile Selassie's chief finan-
cial adviser.) A small contingent of Russian refugees from the
1917 revolution helped to staff Ethiopia's fledgling ministries.
The emperor had many other plans. But before he could
pursue them, the Italians intervened. Thirty-nine years after
Adowa, Benito Mussolini was determined to carve an Italian
empire out of Africa. Some 100,000 Italian troops began moving
across the Eritrea-Ethiopia border at 5:00 A.M. on October 2,
1935. To oppose Italian tanks, aircraft, and poison gas, Haile Se-
lassie fielded an army of 100,000 men who lacked modern equip-
ment and training. Despite a gallant resistance, the Ethiopians
soon gave way before the Italian advance.
Haile Selassie escaped to Djibouti on May 2, 1936. Addis Ababa
fell three days later. The League of Nations, by which the emperor
ETHIOPIA
I THE OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE NEW WORLD
"Bonds of close friendship have been established between our two

governments, and I express the earnest hope that these bonds will
. . . [result] in greater commerce and more frequent intercourse be-
tween Abyssinia and the United States." Thus, in 1919, did President
Woodrow Wilson greet the first Ethiopian envoys to the United
States; they had been dispatched from Africa by Prince Regent Ras
Tafari Makonnen, the future Haile Selassie I.
The link between the United States and Ethiopia was slow to de-
velop. Even before Emperor Menelik's 1896 victory over the Italians
at Adowa, the French, British, and Russians had been expanding
their influence in Ethiopia. Not until 1904, however, were diplo-
matic ties established between the United States and Ethiopia;
business at the U.S. consulate at Addis Ababa was so slow that the
post was shut down in 1907. A report by the State Department two
years later noted that "the evidences are entirely lacking of any . . .
trade opportunities."
The 1919 Ethiopian delegation to the United States came to
congratulate President Wilson on the recent Allied victory in
World War I-and to solicit U.S. private investment in Ethiopia.
Clad in costumes of red velvet embroidered in gold, and wearing
jeweled turbans, the envoys presented President Wilson with
tusks of ivory, gold boxes, and letters from Prince Regent Ras Ta-
fari and Empress Zauditu.
But racial tensions in the United States-riots had flared in Chi-
cago and Washington, D.C-cast a shadow over the Ethiopians'
tour. At one point, the envoys were barred from the National Demo-
cratic Club in New York because, as one member put it, "They're
black; we'll not have black men eating here."
Proud of their Semitic heritage and their 2,500-year history, the
visiting Ethiopians, as Howard University historian Joseph Harris
has noted, "were indignant about the label of 'Negro'." For Ameri-
can blacks, however, the Ethiopians' visit was "a rare opportunity
. . . to identify with . . . an independent African country." Black
newspapers gave extensive coverage to the visitors, who were in-
vited to speak at, among other places, Harlem's Metropolitan
Church. The Ethiopians in turn recruited black American physi-
cians, teachers, and technicians to assist in the development of
Ethiopia. During the 1935-36 Italo-Ethiopian war, several promi-
nent American blacks-including aviator Herbert Julian, "the Black
Eagle of Harlemn-volunteered to fight the Italians.
"Ethiopianism" continued to inspire blacks in America and else-
where to fight for greater civil rights. And racial prejudice notwith-
standing, Haile Selassie saw U.S. friendship as a useful
counterweight to European influences and fostered an alliance that
endured until his overthrow in 1974.

114
ETHIOPIA
had set much store, imposed only ineffective sanctions against Italy.
As King Victor Emmanuele in was being proclaimed Emperor of
Ethiopia, Haile Selassie spoke before the League on June 30,1936, in
Geneva and warned, prophetically, "It is us today. It will be you to-
morrow." The emperor's eloquence won him worldwide applause
and sympathy, but not much else. The London Times summed it up:
"For the little good it can do him now, Haile Selassie has and will
hold a high place in history."
elping the Yanks

Ethiopian guerrillas refused to accept Italian rule without a
struggle. Mussolini, in turn, authorized brutal reprisals. Mar-
shall Rodolfo Graziani, the viceroy of occupied Ethiopia,
avenged a 1937 attempt on his life by executing all Ethiopian
high school and university graduates.
Italian rule was bloody but brief. Soon after Italy entered
World War I1 in June 1940, British troops-bolstered by a large
contingent of South Africans-struck from the Sudan, Kenya,
and British Somaliland (part of present-day Somalia). Five
years to the day after the Italian capture of Addis Ababa, Haile
Selassie returned to his capital, riding in an Alfa Romeo aban-
doned by the Italians. "Today," he announced, "is the beginning
of a new era in the history of Ethiopia."
Haile Selassie picked up where he had left off. The Italian occu-
pation, grim as it was, had also given Ethiopia a 4,000-mile road
network and numerous hospitals, post offices, and public buildings.
The emperor forgave Fascist brutalities and asked individual Italian
settlers to stay. Many of them did, establishing restaurants, hotels,
and successful businesses, including a brewery that produced Me-
lotti, long one of the more popular Ethiopian beers.
The emperor sent a new generation of students abroad and
established the University College of Addis Ababa in 1950, with
instructors drawn from Britain, Sweden, and the United States.
In 1955, a revived constitution defined and expanded the rights
of Ethiopians (though without limiting the emperor's real
power). To broaden Ethiopia's economic base, Haile Selassie
sought help from foreign companies, inviting Trans World Air-
lines to set up Ethiopian Airlines (EAL) in 1946 and a Dutch
firm, HVA-Ethiopia, in 1950 to develop sugar plantations in the
Awash River valley. The Fuji Spinning Company of Japan
helped to double the output of the Cotton Company of Ethiopia.
Haile Selassie's speech before the League of Nations in 1936
not only brought the emperor world recognition but also helped
to ensure postwar assistance from Western Europe, the United

115
ETHIOPIA
States, and the Soviet Union. Besides providing economic aid,

the United States signed a defense-cooperation treaty with
Ethiopia in 1953, formalizing the U.S. presence at Kagnew Tele-
communications Station in Asmera. During the 1960s, Ethiopia
hosted the largest single contingent of U.S. Peace Corps volun-
teers. West Germany sent textbooks and teachers. The Soviet
Union, which had once denounced Haile Selassie as "not the
Lion of Judah but the jackal of American imperialism," invited
him to Moscow for a visit in 1959 and sent him home with an
IL-14 helicopter and a credit line of $100 million.
Some 5,000 men from Ethiopia's crack Imperial Bodyguard
fought alongside United Nations troops in Korea, where the
commander of the U.S. Army's Seventh Division praised their
"outstanding proficiency and unfaltering dependability in com-
bat." Haile Selassie moved to the forefront of the pan-African
movement, hosting a Conference of Independent African States
in 1962 and proposing an African Development Bank (founded
in 1963). At President John F. Kennedy's funeral, the little em-
peror marched with the front rank of world leaders.
Still, the 20th century touched only a small fraction of all
Ethiopians. For the 90 percent of the citizenry who lived in the
countryside, life's goal remained sarto mablat-"having worked,
Ethiopian soldiers in 1935. They faced the Italians led by Rodolfo Graziani,
whose cruelty earned him the title "Butcher of East Africa."

116
ETHIOPIA
to eat." Like the urban laborers of Menelik's time, who refused

to use wheelbarrows, most highland farmers continued to till
the soil with plows pulled by oxen. To this day, as sociologist
Donald Levine has noted, the Ethiopian peasant is deeply con-
servative and "tends to feel that [innovation] is immoral."
Given such attitudes, it is not surprising that for most of his
life, Haile Selassie was ahead of his time. During the 1960s,
however, the times began to catch up. The educated new classes
that the emperor himself had created-students, military offi-
cers, intellectuals, workers, the small but growing bourgeoi-
sie-began demanding more extensive political reforms and
faster economic development.
Resentful Children
In 1960, such discontent was expressed in an abortive coup.
Led by Germame Newaye, a provincial governor educated at
Columbia University, troops of the Imperial Bodyguard seized
the imperial palace while Haile Selassie was off visiting Brazil.
Loyal Army units put down the coup and Germame Newaye
committed suicide. Haile Selassie sadly observed that "trees
that are planted do not always bear the desired fruit."
As the 1960s went on, the emperor's "trees" grew. In an
Africa that acquired the appearance of political freedom over-
night, young Ethiopian technocrats with degrees from Oxford,
Cambridge, or Harvard were embarrassed by an emperor whose
authority derived from Solomonic legend. Many were also frus-
trated by the fact that, despite the emperor's efforts, Ethiopia
remained one of the poorest and least developed countries in the
world. Its 1969 income per capita was $60. Only seven percent of
the population could read; a mere 10 percent of all eligible chil-
dren were in school.
Disenchanted with an economy that failed to provide them
with prestigious jobs, and susceptible to leftist rhetoric, students at
Haile Selassie I University led riots that closed down the school in
1969. Denouncing U.S. "imperialism," they attacked Peace Corps
volunteers, causing the withdrawal of most of the American staff
that same year. The old emperor was perplexed. He had treated his
students like a loving father: Time and time again, he had met with
students arrested by the security forces and released them in return
for promises of better behavior.
The 1960s brought another headache for Haile Selassie: Eri-
trea. Ethiopians saw Eritrea as part of their historical empire.
But ever since Italy had established it as a colony in 1890, Eri-
trea and Ethiopia had gone separate ways. Eritrea on the aver-
ETHIOPIA
age enjoyed a superior educational system and faster economic

development. After the Italian defeat in World War 11, Britain
had occupied Eritrea under a mandate of the United Nations,
which was charged with disposing of Eritrea "in accordance
with the wishes of a majority of the population." In a province
with eight major nationalities and several languages and relig-
ions, those wishes were difficult to ascertain. So, in 1952, Eri-
trea was joined to Ethiopia in a federation; 10 years later, it was
incorporated fully as Ethiopia's 14th province.
While many Eritreans took jobs in other regions of Ethiopia as
teachers, technicians, or businessmen, not all Eritreans were satis-
fied. Some fled abroad and joined separatist groups such as the Er-
itrean Liberation Front (ELF), which became active during the
1960s. Financed and trained by China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia,
Syria, and Iraq, Eritrean gunmen during the 1960s hijacked EAL
jets in Frankfurt and Karachi, and staged raids in the city of As-
mera. Haile Selassie's recognition of China in 1971 ended Chinese
support for the Eritreans; the strength of the insurgency ebbed.
Half of the emperor's army of 45,000 was able to contain the rebel-
lion. Much of the rest was busy patrolling the Somalia-Ethiopia
border, where disputes between the two nations over the Ogaden
periodically erupted into armed clashes.
These conditions, although serious, did not alarm the gov-
ernment ministers in Addis Ababa or the majority of the rural
populace. No new conflicts existed among Ethiopia's many na-
tionalities. Muslims and Christians lived more amicably in
Ethiopia than anywhere else in the Horn of Africa. Insurgency
notwithstanding, Eritreans still traveled to Addis Ababa to work
in government and industry. True, there was an atmosphere of
impending change; Haile Selassie was, after all, mortal. But
most Ethiopians were optimistic and thought that, with a little
time and patience, any change might occur without undue tur-
moil. They were wrong.
The year 1973was not a good one for the 81-year-old King of
Kings. A stroke paralyzed his son and successor, Crown Prince
Asfa Wossen, casting doubt on the monarchy's durability. In the
northern highlands, 500 people were dying each day as a result
of famine brought on by a three-year drought. Government at-
tempts to suppress news of the famine led to severe criticism
The Wilson Quarterlflimer 1984

118
ETHIOPIA
from Ethiopians both inside and outside the government.

Events outside Ethiopia created more problems. Burdened
by Vietnam and Watergate, U.S. influence declined, and with it
the prestige of Ethiopia's U.S.-educated elite and of Haile Selas-
sie himself. The outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War led to the De-
cember 1973 oil price hike by the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries. During February 1974, taxi drivers pro-
testing higher fuel prices were joined by teachers and others de-
manding better wages in a strike that crippled Addis Ababa.
The Lion Dies

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction spread to the military. Troops of
the Second Division, weary of low pay, poor living conditions,
and stalemate in Eritrea, arrested their officers and took control
of Asmera. They sent a 22-point petition to the emperor, com-
plaining, among other things, that "ministers have too many
Mercedes automobiles."
The cracks widened. At February's end, Selassie's cabinet
resigned in the face of popular pressure. Flushed with success,
teachers, enlisted men, students, and municipal workers pep-
pered the new cabinet with demands for higher pay, a new con-
stitution, and land reform. The Ethiopian press joined in: An
editorial in the Ethiopian Herald called for "a transition [that] is
not only a change of names and faces but . . . [also] of concepts."
The country was slipping out of control. Alarmed, the dissi-
dents in the armed forces decided to step in. In April, represent-
atives from all branches of the military formed the Armed
Forces Coordinating Committee, or Derg. By midsummer, the
Derg had arrested 200 former ministers and other high officials,
charging that they had "betrayed" the emperor and were re-
sponsible for the disastrous famine. The government was reor-
ganized, but as the Derg swallowed more and more members of
Haile Selassie's inner circle, it became apparent that the emper-
or's days were numbered.
In the early hours of September 12, 1974-New Year's Day
in Ethiopia-three representatives from the Derg arrived at the
National Palace to take Emperor Haile Selassie to Army head-
quarters. The emperor retained his customary dignity, momen-
tarily hesitating only when he saw that he was to ride in a blue
Volkswagen. "From today," began a Derg statement, "His Impe-
rial Majesty Haile Selassie has been deposed from office." Con-
fined to Menelik's former palace, the King of Kings, Conquering
Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God Haile Selassie I died on
August 27,1975.

119
ETHIOPIA
The Semien Mountains in northern Ethiopia's Gander Province. Despite

such rugged terrain, some 65 percent of Ethiopia's land is arable.
Ethiopia's ruling Derg is today avowedly Marxist. How it

got that way is a matter of debate. Clearly, the Soviet Union had
been active in Ethiopia during the 1960s; in 1969, three Soviet
"diplomats" were expelled from Ethiopia for passing money
and Marxist literature to students. But before the revolution, it
would have been impossible to identify any overt pro-Soviet,
procommunist, or even prosocialist Ethiopian organization
(barring some few groups of students and intellectuals). And
thanks to the secrecy of the postrevolutionary Derg-which
rarely discloses the number or identity of its members-the
sources of its political ideology, and its reasons for adopting it,
remain unclear.
What is clear is that the Derg introduced "Ethiopian social-
ism" soon after the emperor was out of the way. In March 1975,
sweeping rural land reform was decreed; 50,000 students were
sent to the countryside to "transmit the values of the revolu-
tion." In the cities, families could keep one dwelling; all other
property reverted to the state. Kebelles, neighborhood commit-
tees modeled on those in Cuba, administered nationalized prop-
erty in cities and towns. The Derg also nationalized banks,
insurance companies, and most foreign investments.
Before the arrival of "Ethiopian socialism," the revolution had
ETHIOPIA
been remarkably nonviolent. Indeed, in June 1974 Abiy Gobegna,

Ethiopia's most popular novelist, had declared, "How proud I am
of my country-all this change and no blood." The Derg soon dis-
appointed him. On November 23,1974,59 former officials were ex-
ecuted. In the years that followed, the Derg unleashed what it
called the Red Terror to crush all opposition. In March 1977, after
the radical Marxist Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (PRP)
accused the Derg of fostering military dictatorship, Derg vice-
chairman Atnafu Abate armed the kebelles, ordering them to
"cleanse the city of these undesirable elements." Some 300 stu-
dents were killed in one day, a Derg spokesman observing that
"being young is no excuse for being reactionary."
But discerning who was radical or reactionary was no easy
matter. Nor was it clear who really ran the Derg. A February
1977 shoot-out that ended with the death of Derg chairman Gen-
eral Teferi Banti and eight other Derg members brought Lt. Col.
Mengistu to power. Long-rumored to be the man in charge,
Mengistu consolidated his position by executing Atnafu in No-
vember 1977 for "placing the interests of Ethiopia above the in-
terests of socialism."
As the new chairman, Mengistu had his hands full. Much of
the country was in open rebellion against the central govern-
ment. Somali president Mohammed Siad Barre had decided
that Ethiopia was falling apart and was preparing to attack.
Ever since the former colonies of British and Italian Somaliland
had merged in 1960 to form the Somali Republic, the Somalis
had claimed the largely Somali-inhabited Ogaden region (as
well as parts of Kenya and Djibouti).
Enter Fidel Castro

During the 1960s, the Russians had begun arms shipments
to the Somalis. A 1974 USSR-Somalia friendship treaty pro-
vided Somalia with more T-55 tanks, MiG jets, and some 4,000
Soviet "advisers." By July 1977, when Somali troops-thinly
disguised as guerrillas-fanned across the Somalia-Ethiopia
border, the Soviet Union had delivered more than $500 million
worth of equipment. In contrast, despite the Derg's praise for
Moscow-style "socialism," no significant Soviet aid had been
sent to Ethiopia. Up until a year after Haile Selassie's death, in
fact, the United States continued to be Ethiopia's main source of
military hardware.;'
'Over a period of 25 years, the United States supplied Ethiopia with $287 million in mili-
tary aid, including F-5E fighter-bombers. More than 3,000 Ethiopian officers were trained
in the United States; among them, ironically, was Mengistu.
f i e Ii'il.'ioQuaned?
i~ Wii~ier1
121
ETHIOPIA
But Congress soon grew reluctant to support the bloody-

minded Derg. Citing human-rights abuses, the White House in 1977
suspended ammunition deliveries. In response, Mengistu expelled
the 46-member U.S. Military Advisory Assistance Group and closed
down the U.S. Information Service office.
The Soviets eagerly exploited the growing estrangement. The
chance of a foothold in one of Africa's oldest independent na-
tions-with two ports on the Red Sea coast superior to facilities
at Berbera in Somalia-was more enticing than Moscow's stake
in Somalia. Facing a threat similar to the one posed by Ahmad
Gran's invasion 450 years before, Mengistu turned to Moscow for
help. During November 1977, the Russians began their largest
overseas airlift, ferrying more than $1 billion worth of aircraft,
tanks, rocket launchers, helicopters, ammunition, vehicles, and
other materiel. Fidel Castro sent a total of 17,000Cuban troops to
provide a "defensive shield [for] the Ethiopian revolution."
Jilted, the Somalis evicted their Soviet "advisers." By March
1978, the Ethiopians had recaptured the Ogaden, and the bat-
tered Somalis had withdrawn. An uneasy truce between the two
nations has prevailed ever since.
Meanwhile, the Eritrean insurgents had not been idle. In
Despite the large turnout on annual Revolution Day (September 12) parades
in Addis Ababa, communist ideology has yet to attract ordinary Ethiopians,
who often joke about the new "bearded trinity" of Lenin, M a n , and Engels.

122
ETHIOPIA
fact, they met with more success than the Somalis. By early
1978, the insurgents-dominated now by the Marxist Eritrean
People's Liberation Front (EPLF)-controlled 90 percent of Eri-
trea and had Massawa and Asmera under siege.
The Marxist Derg has adamantly refused to negotiate with
the Marxist EPLF. And despite periodic infusions of Russian
equipment, repeated offensives against the EPLF have failed.
One reason: Castro refused to let Cuban troops fight guerrillas
whom Cuba had once trained. Skeptical Ethiopians see more
sinister motives behind Castro's refusal to help. As long as the
situation in Eritrea festers, the Derg will remain dependent on
Moscow for military aid. Today, the EPLF still ties down
100,000 of Mengistu's troops.
On the surface, Ethiopia in 1984 appears similar to many

another Soviet client. Fidel Castro came to celebrate Revolution
Day in September 1978; two months later Mengistu went to
Moscow to sign a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the
Soviet Union. East Germans, Bulgarians, and North Koreans
sent specialists to advise the security services, the government
press, and the ministry of agriculture. Now, Ethiopia's 30,000
television sets bring viewers programs from Moscow such as
"Comrade Andropov's Contribution to World Peace."
But ordinary Ethiopians do their best to make the Soviet
contingent in the country, 1,500 strong, feel uncomfortable. The
Soviet embassy continually complains that "hooligans" insult its
people in the streets and treat them poorly in shops. Mengistu
himself has hardly been a supine disciple. He has stubbornly ad-
hered to his own schedule for setting up the Communist Party
that the Russians had been demanding since 1978. Only this past
September was the party finally established. Bureaucrats and
military officers, not peasants or workers, fill its ranks.
A Communist Party, however, does not a communist coun-
try make. Examples from Ethiopia's history suggest that ideol-
ogy imposed from above rarely takes root below. During the
16th century, after the Portuguese saved Ethiopia from the Mus-
lims, Portuguese missionaries came to convert the Ethiopians
from their Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism. Success
seemed theirs in 1622, when the emperor Susenyos agreed to ac-
cept the Roman faith. But the Ethiopian populace balked. The
native clergy and members of the imperial family rebelled. In
1632, Susenyos was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, who
promptly expelled the Jesuits. Mengistu speaks often of Ethio-
The Wilson Quarterly'/Winier 1984

123
ETHIOPIA
pian history. Has he pondered this lesson?

In order to remain in power, Mengistu, like Haile Selassie be-
fore him, must satisfy rising expectations. With a population that
is increasing by 2.5 percent every year, becoming more literate,
and clamoring for jobs and a higher standard of living, that will
not be easy. Well-managed enterprises such as EAL-which re-
cently purchased two Boeing 767s-and the successful Telecom-
munications Authority demonstrate that Ethiopians have a talent
for modem technology. But the war in Eritrea, which is home to
one-third of Ethiopia's industrial base, has not helped.
Agriculture, Ethiopia's economic mainstay, is also slipping.
The Derg continues to push collectivization schemes that Ethio-
pian peasants resist. Large state farms produce a scant six per-
cent of the nation's grain but receive 90 percent of all
agricultural investment. The current famine has seriously de-
pleted grain reserves. The United States alone is supplying $26.6
million in emergency food aid in 1984.
Ethiopia now runs a current account deficit of almost $700
million. This is double that of five years ago. To make up the
shortfall, the Derg has turned to the assets that Ethiopia has in
abundance: history and scenery. The Ethiopian Tourist Com-
mission touts trips to "Africa's best-kept secretu-the Bale
Mountains National Park, with its giant cedars, exotic birdlife,
and the rare mountain nyala antelope. Schools in Addis Ababa
now train Ethiopians as guides, waiters, and room clerks. Near
the city's Revolution Square, a site has been cleared for a new
Sheraton Hotel. And in the city of Gonder, once the imperial
capital, the recently opened Goha Hotel looks down from a
mountain top upon the seven palaces built for the emperors of
the 17th and 18th centuries.
In the end, it is Ethiopia's culture that endures. Marx might
wince to discover that church attendance in Ethiopia is higher
than it has ever been. But then he would probably be astonished
to hear Mengistu claiming to be a Marxist. One must not forget
that a genuine revolution occurred in Ethiopia in 1974. Until a
small military clique took over, the makers of the revolution
aimed only to speed the pace of reform and make Ethiopian soci-
ety more open and pluralistic. Quite the opposite has happened.
But little in Ethiopia's long history suggests that the present un-
happy course is irreversible.
"Ethiopia has been looked upon [by he's a Danakil; if he's herding cattle,
Westerners] as a terribly remote land; he's a Somali. . . . If he's an Amhara,
a home of pristine piety; a magnifi- he has a Volkswagen."
cent kingdom; an outpost of savagery; Those interested in the early history
or a bastion of African independ- of the Amhara and the Tigre should
ence." So writes sociologist Donald turn to archaeologist Yuri M. Kobish-
N . Levine in his comprehensive chanov's Axum (Pa. State Univ., 1979),
Greater Ethiopia (Univ. of Chicago, the most thorough volume on the sub-
1974, cloth & paper). Often neglected ject, and to David Buxton's richly illus-
by foreign analysts, he observes, are trated volume, The Abyssinians
the Ethiopians themselves. (Praeger, 1970, cloth; 1972, paper).
There are more than 20 major "Abyssinia," he points out, is a corrup-
Ethiopian tribes. Yet, despite the dif- tion of "Habesha," the South Arabian
ferences among such tribes as the no- word for Ethiopia.
madic Danakil, the sedentary The Amhara are known for their
Wollamo, the age-ranked Konso, and subtlety. The title of Donald N. Lev-
the patrilineal Somali, Levine ex- ine's analysis of Amhara society,
plains, they all share similar cultural Wax and Gold (Univ. of Chicago,
traits. For example, almost all Ethio- 1965, cloth; 1972, paper), is also the
pians-whether pagan, Muslim, name of a favorite form of Amhara
Jewish, or Coptic Christian-are poetry, in which all expressions have
monotheistic. two meanings, the superficial and
Commerce, intermarriage, and the real. As Levine notes, "when [an
warfare brought these tribes into Amhara] talks, his words often carry
contact with one another, inaugurat- double-entendres as a m a t t e r of
ing ties that have endured through course ."
the ages. The farming Amhara, for By all accounts, there are few pas-
example, have come to depend on times that an Ethiopian, rich or
Afar tribesmen for the mining of salt, poor, enjoys more than a clever dis-
on Muslims for trade, and on the Fa- cussion or a lengthy argument. In
lashas for clay pots, leather goods, The Government of Ethiopia (Faber
and silver work. The Dorze-famed & Faber, 1948), a scholarly examina-
for their weaving skill-must pro- tion of Ethiopia's political and eco-
cure the kalacha, a forehead orna- nomic institutions during the early
ment worn as a symbol of rank, from years of Haile Selassie's reign, histo-
the Konso. rian Margery Perham writes that
Some tribes, notably the Amhara "litigation was a favourite amuse-
and the Tigre, have usually domi- ment. . . . Parties in civil and even
nated others. An ethnic pecking minor criminal disputes would call
order persists in Ethiopia even to- upon a passerby to decide the issue
day. In Edmund P. Murray's novel between them under a tree, and
Kulubi (Crown, 1973), the tale of an these informal roadside courts might
American journalist in Ethiopia, one last for hours. . . ."
character explains, "If you see a man Despite this penchant for debate,
with a donkey, you can be sure he's ordinary Ethiopians were not drawn
an Oromo. . . . If a man has camels, to politics after World War I1 until

125
BACKGROUND BOOKS: ETHIOPIA
the onset of the revolution that top- entist Christopher S . Clapham ex-
pled Haile Selassie in 1974. In Ethio- plains the bizarre workings of Haile
pia: The Modernization of Autocracy Selassie's Government (Praeger,
(Cornell, 1970, cloth; 1971, paper), 1969) and describes the emperor's
historian Robert L. Hess notes that prudent strategy of shum shir-mov-
there was no external threat or colo- ing cabinet ministers from post to
nial regime to stir the nationalist post to keep them from developing
spirit that animated politics in other their own constituencies. Loyalty,
African nations after 1945. rather than efficiency, determined
The emperor encouraged some po- imperial favor.
litical participation, but he reserved The Byzantine intrigue of Haile Se-
real power for himself. Political sci- lassie's court is detailed by the Polish
ETHIOPIAN JOURNEYS
In Orlando Furioso (1516) the Italian Renaissance poet Ludovico

Ariosto describes a visit to Prester John, the mythical ruler of Ethio-
pia, in whose palace "pearls and gems of passing price 1 Were sprin-
kled on the pavements here and there."
Such flights of fancy were commonplace in early European descrip-
tions of Ethiopia, as of the rest of Africa. Eyewitness accounts were
often no more accurate. In Travelers in Ethiopia (Oxford, 1965, cloth
& paper), historian Richard Pankhurst quotes the 16th-century Vene-
tian, Alessandro Zorzi, as saying that the Ethiopians "live to a great
age, up to 150 years, [and] they never in old age lose their sight." One
of the first reliable accounts of life in Ethiopia is the Englishman
James Bruce's eight-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile
(Robinson, 1790; Horizon, 1964). During his four-year (1769-72) so-
journ in Ethiopia, Bruce crisscrossed the country by horse, noting the
"singularities which prevailed in this barbarous country."
Most later European travelers tended to paint Ethiopians in prim-
itive colors. In his three-volume The Highlands of Aethiopia (Long-
man, 1844), Major W. Cornwallis Harris, a British envoy, concluded
that the Ethiopian Emperor Sahle Selassie was subject to "the insa-
tiable love of plunder inherent in the breast of every savage." Far
more amusing but no less malicious is Evelyn Waugh's chronicle of
Haile Selassie's 1930 coronation in When the Going Was Good
(Greenwood, 1934; Little, Brown, 1984, cloth & paper). At one native
celebration, Waugh witnessed "guests . . . quite stupefied with food
and drink. . . . The chiefs were hoisted onto their mules by their re-
tainers and remained there blinking and smiling. . . . Others, lacking
support, rolled contentedly in the dust."
Waugh's account was the last of the great Ethiopian travelogues.
Shortly after its publication, Benito Mussolini's attempts to "civil-
ize" Ethiopia through conquest brought the country out of isolation
and onto the world stage. To political scientists and anthropologists,
Ethiopia was now open for serious study.

126
BACKGROUND BOOKS: ETHIOPIA
journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in tists Fred Halliday and Marina Moly-

The Emperor (Harcourt, 1983, cloth; neux d e s c r i b e t h e h a v o c i n
Vintage, 1984, paper), a compilation revolutionary Ethiopia and note that
of post-1974 interviews with former from 1976 to 1978, some 30,000 civil-
members of the imperial household. ians were imprisoned and several
Every morning, Haile Selassie thousand killed.
strolled in his garden, feeding his Within the Derg itself, disagree-
caged lions and leopards and hearing ment over the best response to the
reports from court informers and separatist movement in the northern
spies, each pitted against the others: province of Eritrea led to violence.
"Tired, looking as if they hadn't The faction of Derg chairman Gen-
slept, they acted under feverish eral Aman Andom, himself an Eri-
stress, pursuing their victims. . . . trean, advocated negotiating with
They had no shield but the emperor, the rebels. But Aman Andom died in
and the emperor could undo them all a shoot-out with the forces of Lt. Col.
with one wave of his hand." Mengistu Haile Mariam, the present
Even so, the emperor's network chairman of the Derg, who has since
failed to avert the 1974 revolution launched annual (ineffectual) offen-
that saw him unseated by a group of sives against the Eritreans. Richard
noncommissioned officers. The spirit Sherman's Eritrea: The Unfinished
that animated the Ethiopian revolu- Revolution (Praeger, 1980, cloth &
tion, a t least in its early stages, is paper) provides a good guide to the
best captured in B. M. Sahle Sellas- origins of that continuing conflict.
sie's novel Firebrands (Longman, However, political scientist Haggai
1979, cloth & paper). The hero, an Erlich's The Struggle over Eritrea
idealistic Amhara ex-student, joins a (Hoover, 1983, cloth & paper) is the
s t a t e corporation a s a n auditor, most up-to-date volume.
wanting only to contribute to the Much has happened in the turbu-
progress of his country. Disillusioned lent 10 years since the revolution. In
by chronic nepotism and corruption, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution
he assaults his boss and is impris- (Holmes & Meier, 1978, cloth; 1983,
oned. He is finally set free during the paper), Washington Post correspon-
civil unrest of February 1974, "when dent David Ottaway and political
the forces of oppression and those of scientist Marina Ottaway observe
liberation met in an open clash." that in destroying "an antiquated
The novel's heady rhetoric ob- and oppressive system, the Ethio-
scures the bloody struggles for power pian revolution had met its goal."
that went on between the military But the Derg's continuing political
rulers of the revolutionary Derg and repression and Ethiopia's dim eco-
the civilian opposition. In The Ethio- nomic performance suggest that the
pian Revolution (New Left Books, creation of a free and prosperous so-
1982, cloth & paper), political scien- ciety lies far in the future.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Some of the titles in this essay were suggested by Professor Edmond D.
Keller of the Department of Black Studies at the University o f California, Santa Barbara.
The Wil.soiz Quarter/\~/I\'inter 1984

127
FELLOWS' C
H. G . WELLS: Oscar Wilde, the person most responsible for

Aspects of a Life first getting H. G. Wells into print, once ob-
by Anthony West served that children begin by idolizing their
Random House, 1984 parents, later come to understand them, and
405 pp. $22.95 rarely, if ever, forgive them. The observation
has particular relevance to this book. An-
thony West, himself a distinguished writer, is
the "natural" son of H. G. Wells and Rebecca
West-a union that could be described as one
of the most intellectually charged adulteries
of the 20th century. West has managed in this book to idolize, then to un-
derstand, and then to forgive his father, both for his scandalous life and for
his unsettling genius.
A genius Wells most certainly was. He was also one of the more con-
troversial figures in the England of his day. Novelist, prophet, historian,
and self-appointed teacher to the world, he wrote more than 200 books
during his lifetime (1866-1946), all the while managing to lead a life of
virtually uninterrupted and scarcely concealed erotic adventure. Reckon-
ing up the proportion of savant to charlatan in Wells's life or writings is no
easy task. But West makes a good, if admittedly biased, job of it.
The book, which falls generically somewhere between biography and
memoir, begins not with Wells's birth but with West's, on August 5, 1914,
in Norfolk, England. Wells was not present. He was busily engaged in
drafting the essay that would give its name to World War I, then just cast-
ing its shadow over Europe: "The War That Will End War." West thus
quickly establishes one of the book's major themes: the tension between
Wells's personal passions and his commitments to the public good.
The book's beginning also serves to emphasize what West believes
was his father's foremost literary office-that of explainer and interpreter
of ideas to the general public. If West slightly underplays Wells's gifts as a
novelist and gives far too short shrift to the great, early science-fiction
tales, his emphasis is not completely misplaced. "In light of hindsight,"
writes West, "it is easy to underestimate my father's skill and effectiveness
as a popularizer and propagandist; much of what he was saying in the
early '20s has since become commonplace because his advocacy won it
widespread acceptance. But he was not thought to be dealing with com-
monplaces at the time."
Against the conventional critical line-and against the opinions of his
mother, Rebecca West-Anthony West maintains that Wells was not
merely a talented journalist with novelistic pretensions, nor a melan-
cholic with a radically unstable sexual imagination, but a true visionary,
possessed by the desire to save his fellow man from self-destruction. Wells,
says West, understood before most of his contemporaries the necessity of a
League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War and argued
CURRENT BOOKS
strenuously against early Western anti-Soviet policies. He learned, partly

under the tutelage of his friend and sometime-lover Margaret Sanger, the
importance of feminism to any vision claiming to be humanistic. To the
end of his life, he identified himself as a socialist, but his brand of social-
ism was rather like the Protestantism of another great Englishman, John
Milton-a church of one. In most undoctrinaire fashion, he identified
America, not Russia, as the country that held the best hope for a humane
society. The evils of capitalism, he allowed, could never be as awful as
those of Marxist communism.
Wells dies halfway through the book. The second half begins with a
detailed account of his father's parents, their cramped working-class life
in Bromley, England, and the struggles of young H. G. to enter the
literary-intellectual world. This break with straightforward narrative
does not jar. Indeed, it helps West contrast the public man, "Wells," who
did so many things and influenced so many people, with the private man,
"my father," the driven and sometimes confused individual whose inter-
nal conflicts make such a compelling story.
The immensely readable business of bringing "Wells" and "my fa-
ther" together-the business of Aspects of a Life-involves some diverting,
occasionally nasty, bits of biographical revision and chitchat. Henry
James, with whom Wells had a famous feud over the political responsibili-
ties of the novelist, is here presented as an autocratic bully quite different
from the pure and selfless artist championed by university departments of
English. George Bernard Shaw, who promoted and then undermined
Wells's influence in the Fabian Society, fares scarcely better.
As interesting as such tidbits are, the whole of this book exceeds the
sum of its parts. Its anecdotal style is as carefully and deceptively con-
trived as that of a novel such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760).
And what it gives us in the end is a three-dimensional portrait of a man
and writer who deserves no less.
-Fra?zl< McConnell, '78
PARTNERS IN Between the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and

REVOLUTION: the Easter Rising of the Irish Volunteers in
The United Irishmen 1916, the supremacy of the London govern-
and France ment in the British Isles faced only two seri-
by Marianne Elliott ous internal military challenges. The first
Yale, 1982
41 1 pp. $30 was the Scottish Jacobite Rebellion of 1745;
the second, the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Often
ignored among the great political upheavals
of the late 18th century, the Irish uprising
was, as Elliott, a historian at Swansea's Uni-
versity College, demonstrates, very much a part of the wider interna-
tional movement of reform.
The rank-and-file Irish insurgents of this rebellion were predomi-
nantly Catholics and thought of their struggle as being, at least in part,
anti-Protestant. Yet, ironically, most of the leaders were Protestants-and
CURRENT BOOKS
therefore of the ruling or at least of the politically enfranchised castes of

18th-century Ireland. Inspired by the ideals and examples of the French,
American, and (17th-century) English revolutions, the leaders, many of
them members of the United Irish Society, actively sought the aid of the
French in their fight for independence from Britain. For a short time, it ap-
peared as though Ireland might gain autonomy. To the British and their
allies then struggling against Napoleon, it seemed frighteningly possible
that Ireland would become an ally of France.
Elliott focuses on the activities of the United Irishmen, an organiza-
tion founded in 1791 in Belfast by Wolfe Tone and other Protestant law-
yers, professionals, and merchants. The society's goal a t first was
parliamentary reform; their means, writes Elliott, "the union of the Irish
people." (Tone had himself penned a brilliantly conciliatory essay aimed
at unifying Protestants and Catholics against excessive English influence
in Ireland.) The Society quickly became a classic revolutionary leader-
ship, more adept at international intrigue in London, Paris, Hamburg, and
Philadelphia than at organizing or leading Irish peasants. Its members
were not social revolutionaries seeking land reform but political revolu-
tionaries attempting to restore the principles of the "ancient constitution"
abandoned by the English rulers. They preferred moderate liberal think-
ers, John Locke or Adam Smith, to such radicals as the French socialist
Francois Babeuf.
Elliott traces the rebellion from its roots in the conspiratorial society
gatherings during the early 1790s through the ill-organized explosion of
1798. Her devastating documentation of rebel incompetence and occa-
sional brutality is balanced by her picture of the British government's un-
fortunate dependence on ill-disciplined local Protestant Irish militias.
Perhaps 50,000 Catholic Irishmen-most of them noncombattants-were
slain during the brutal uprising that followed the rebellion. The last chap-
ters of Elliott's narrative follow the United Irishmen into exile. The tale is
one of "frustration, bitterness, internal bickering, and ultimate disen-
chantment with French promises. . . ."
Subsequent independence movements in Ireland enjoyed little Protes-
tant support. Today, with Eire free, and Northern Ireland torn by sectar-
ian strife, Irish republicanism is no longer a generous, liberal, or
international movement. It has become the narrow, murderous, and chau-
vinistic Provisional Irish Republican Army of Ulster.
-Tom Gan'in
CURRENT BOOKS
History
CHANTS DEMOCRATIC: The "republican consensus," forged during

New York City and the Rise the first decades of America's national life, os-
of the American Working tensibly united all citizens in a classless soci-
Class, 1788-1850 ety. Many historians, including Marxists,
by Sean Wilentz have downplayed and even denied the impor-
Oxford, 1984
446 pp. $34.95 tance of class and "class consciousness" in
that "republican" era. Wilentz, a Princeton
historian, challenges that assumption. His re-
construction of the world of artisanal indus-
tries in New York City between 1788 and
1850 reveals that certain key republican
ideals, while nominally shared, meant
sharply different things to different people.
To the working man, "independence" meant
personal freedom, the right to chart one's
own course. But it also implied an "ethic of
mutualityu-which, in economic terms,
meant fair wages fairly distributed. Owners
and masters, however, took independence to
mean the freedom to pursue profit, even
when this involved lowering wages. By 1850,
a wave of strikes led by militant tailors, print-
ers, carpenters, and other tradesmen, sig-
naled a complete "bifurcation of artisan
republicanism." Workers, many now mem-
bers of labor cooperatives, began insisting
that labor was a form of property; therefore,
they had the right to determine its price. The
development of a working-class conscious-
ness, Wilentz notes, was neither uninter-
rupted nor complete. Such popular
movements as evangelicalism and the mid-
19th-century temperance crusade, for exam-
ple, were able, a t least temporarily, to
contain and divert worker discontent.
MONTE CASSINO In the year A.D. 529, on a mountain over-

by David Hapgood looking the town of Cassino and a main route
and David Richardson from southern Italy to Rome, Saint Benedict
Congdon & Weed, 1984 founded what was to become, for a time, the
269 pp. $17.95
greatest monastery in the Western world.
During World War 11, on February 15, 1944,
several hundred Allied bombers virtually lev-
eled Benedict's abbey. Authors Hapgood and
Richardson, drawing on the personal ac-
The Wilson Quarterly/Witlrer 1984

CURRENT BOOKS
counts of Allied, German, and Italian partici-

pants, have produced a taut, well-paced nar-
rative examining the military reasons and the
political machinations behind one of the
war's most controversial decisions. Blocked
in the valley below Monte Cassino by German
troops, Allied commanders began to suspect
that the abbey was an observation post for
the enemy's artillery. The authors, however,
conclude that the Germans "made no mili-
tary use of the monastery itself," though they
did store munitions in caves near the build-
ing. The Germans had, in fact, been decent
custodians of the abbey, moving most of its
priceless treasures to Rome. (Several master-
pieces were diverted to Hermann Goring's
private collection.) The Allied Fifth Army
commander, Mark Clark, unconvinced of the
German presence in the monastery itself,
tried hard to follow General Dwight D. Eisen-
hower's directive to spare all monuments ex-
cept in cases of "military necessity." But bat-
tlefield politics forced his hand: Lt. Gen.
Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand threatened
to withdraw his troops, which had already suf-
fered great losses, unless the monastery were
bombed. Ironically, once reduced to rubble,
the abbey provided the Germans with an ex-
cellent defensive position. After three more
months of fruitless fighting, the Allied Army
took another route north to Rome.
I N SEARCH OF THE Drews, a Vanderbilt classics scholar, has

SHROUD OF TURIN: wrought a minor miracle by charting a plau-
New Light on Its sible middle way in the shroud of Turin con-
History and Origins troversy. Hailed as Christendom's most
by Robert Drews cherished relic, the shroud is thought by ar-
Rowman & Allanheld, 1984
133 pp. $17.95 dent devotees to be the burial cloth of Jesus.
They maintain that it was imprinted at the
moment of the Resurrection by a burst of ra-
diant energy and that it continues to bear a
faint image of the scourged, crucified, bleed-
ing Christ. Skeptics hold that the object is a
forgery dating from the 14th century. Ian
Wilson's The Shroud of Turin (1979) and Joe
Nickell's Inquest on the Shroud of Turin
(1983) best represent the affirmative and neg-

132
CURRENT BOOKS
ative viewpoints. Weighing the opposing ar-

guments in light of late classical and early
ecclesiastical history, Drews concludes that
the shroud dates from the first or second cen-
tury of the common era; that it originated
among the Gnostics, an early Christian sect
that venerated icons (a practice deemed idol-
atrous by the earliest "orthodox" Christians,
as it had been by the Jews); that it was made
by human hand instead of by supernatural in-
tervention. By supreme irony, the Gnostics
believed only in a spiritual resurrection of
Christ; yet, by manufacturing the sole surviv-
ing image of Jesus, they provided evidence for
what became the orthodox belief in Christ's
physical resurrection. Drews convincingly
reconstructs the subsequent life of the forma
Christi, including its "disappearance from
history" until its reappearance in France in
the 14th century. Along the way, Drews re-
veals much about dogmatic controversies
and sectarian differences within the early
Christian church.
Contemporary Affairs
ABORTION AND In the United States today, approximately

THE POLITICS OF one in four pregnancies ends in abortion-a
MOTHERHOOD percentage that also prevailed during the
by Kristin Luker early 19th century. Yet Americans are far
Univ. of Calif., 1984 more divided over the question today than
324 pp. $14.95
they were 180 years ago. Why? Luker, a Uni-
versity of California, San Diego, sociologist,
draws on historical records and interviews
with contemporary pro- and antiabortion ac-
tivists to explain how and why attitudes
changed. In 1800, performing an abortion
during the first trimester was, a t worst, a
misdemeanor under common law; no state
had enacted statutes specifically governing
abortions. By 1900, largely as the result of
pressure from increasingly professionalized
physicians, every state had laws regulating,
though not banning, abortion. The doctors'
concern was medical, not moral. Today, by
contrast, the issue is intricately bound up

133
CURRENT BOOKS
with questions of family structure, relations

between men and women, and economic op-
portunity. Indeed, says Luker, the debate be-
tween the activists on both sides is "a referen-
dum on the place and meaning of
motherhood." Opponents of abortion are usu-
ally either women who, by choice, work only
in the home, or men who value the traditional
economic and social relations of the sexes.
The strongest supporters of legalized abor-
tion tend to be middle-class professional
women. If married, they (and their husbands)
want to plan the births of their children ac-
cording to career demands. Traditionalist
women fear that devaluing the fetus also de-
values their chief bond with their spouses.
Feminists argue that women's inability to
control pregnancy would enable employers to
justify limiting occupational and salary op-
tions for women. Luker does not offer any so-
lutions. Rather, she helps to clarify for others
the assumptions and values of those activists
on each side of this rending debate.
ENDLESS ENEMIES: Woodrow Wilson hoped to make the world

The Making of an safe for democracy; Kwitny, 13 years a re-
Unfriendly World porter for the Wall Street Journal, would like
by Jonathan Kwitny to see it made so for capitalism. But he sees
Congdon & lgg4 little hope that this will be as long as Wash-
435 pp. $19.95
ington persists in pressing upon the world not
"our system, which encourages free choice,
but some convoluted notion of our system
which imposes our choice." The single-
minded pursuit of military a n d security
goals-above all, the containment of com-
munism-has undercut what he believes
should be America's primary goal: the en-
couragement of free trade. Kwitny cites
case after case of misdirection in American
foreign policy. In Zaire during the 1960s,
for example, the U.S. opposition to "Marx-
ist" leader Patrice Lumumba contributed
to the demise of that African state's fledg-
ling free-enterprise system. Since then, un-
der the inept and corrupt leadership of
America's supposed "friend," Mobutu Sese
Seko, resource-rich Zaire has become a n
economic disaster area. U.S. foreign-policy
The Wilson Quarrel-ly1IVinter1984

134
CURRENT BOOKS
excesses not only hurt other nations, says

Kwitny. They tarnish America's interna-
tional image and frequently drive Third
World countries into Moscow's embrace.
Not least, the price of maintaining the "big
stickw-the arsenal behind our aggressive
global posture-now exacts roughly $1,000
a year from each American taxpayer.
Arts & Letters
DREAMS, ILLUSIONS, To Westerners, few things are more confusing

AND OTHER REALITIES than "the Indian view of reality." Really a
by Wendy Doniger composite picture emerging from Hindu,
O'Flaherty Buddhist, and other religious and philosoph-
Univ. of Chicago, 1984 ical traditions, it is a collage of seemingly
361 pp. $25
contradictory propositions about the world
and man's place in it. O'Flaherty, a professor
of religion at the University of Chicago, is fa-
miliar with Western bewilderment before
this maze of Indian paradox: "We owe to
Plato," she writes, "our belief that it is impos-
sible at one time to hold contradictory opin-
ions about the same thing; many Indian texts,
by contrast, would argue that if two ideas
clash, both may be true." In stories about the
Hindu pantheon, for instance, a god can be
both the father and the son of another god:
"From Purusa Viraj was born," says the
Rgveda, "and from Viraj came Purusa." The
tales selected and translated by O'Flaherty
from classic Indian texts such as the Vedas,
the Upanisads, and particularly the Yogava-
sistha consistently blur, even deny, the dis-
tinction between subjective human
perceptions (illusions, dreams, instances of
d6ja vu) and external objective events. The
point of these tales, many of which treat
dreams within dreams or the theme of the
"dreamer dreamt," is surprisingly consistent:
that the universe is illusion, or rnaya. That is
not to say that the world is unreal, O'Flaherty
cautions (correcting a common Western mis-
understanding of the word maya), but rather
"that it is not what it seems to be, that it is
something constantly being made."
CURRENT BOOKS
TRIBUTES: Interpreters Gombrich, former director of the University

of Our Cultural of London's Warburg Institute, is one of the
Tradition world's foremost art historians. Not surpris-
by E. H. Gombrich ingly, these tributes to 12 great Western hu-
Cornell, 1984 manists-from the philosopher Georg W. F.
270 pp. $34.95
Hegel to the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud-
frequently illuminate Gombrich's own histor-
ical and aesthetic preoccupation. He credits
Hegel, for instance, with fathering the disci-
pline of art history by recognizing that stan-
dards of beauty (and, therefore, styles of art)
change according to the "spirit of the age."
Gombrich praises Freud's interpretive bril-
liance, particularly as shown in The Interpre-
tation of Dreams (1900) and other studies of
the unconscious mind. But most of all, Gom-
brich respects Freud for the restraint he dis-
played in writing about works of art such as
Michelangelo's Moses or Leonardo's The Vir-
gin and Child with Saint Anne; Freud consist-
ently refused to explain a work of a r t by
exposing its creator's neuroses-to say more
than he [Freud] thought he could answer
for." The Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga,
whose Homo ludens (1949) and other books
explored the importance of the "play ele-
ment" to the civilized life of a society, epito-
mized Gombrich's ideal of humanism: the art
of showing others, through the study of hu-
man works. "what man can be."
A DISCOURSE BY Difficult decisions faced the Japanese at the

THREE DRUNKARDS end of the 19th century. Just emerging from a
ON GOVERNMENT feudal past as European powers were busy
by Nakae Chomin carving up the rest of Asia, the islanders had to
translated by Nobuko protect their territory and modernize. Nakae
Tsukui
Weatherhill, 1984 Chomin, a prominent intellectual of the Meiji
137 pp. $12.50 Era (1869-1912), made Japan's dilemma the
subject of an imaginary dialogue, published in
1887 and now translated into English by Tsu-
kui, a professor of English literature at George
Mason University. Master Nankai, an open-
minded chap who likes to mix drink with po-
litical discussion, plays host to two men es-
pousing radically different programs for the
future of their country. One guest, the Gentle-
man of Western Learning, echoing his cher-
The Wilson Quartcrly/Winler 1984

136
CURRENT BOOKS
ished European authors, wants to make Japan

"a laboratory for democracy, equality, moral
principles, and learning." He would abolish
the monarchy and disband the military.
Armed only with political freedom and civic
virtue, Japan could progress without fearing
the Western nations whose best values she
would so avidly endorse. The other guest, the
Champion of the East, dismisses the Gentle-
man's ideas as something that "can be written
in a book but cannot be practiced." War, he in-
sists, "is an inevitable force in the actual
world," and Japan can compete with the West
only by military expansion. His counsel: to in-
vade "a great country . . . vast and rich in nat-
ural resources"-an obvious allusion to China.
Just "empty words," pronounces the host of
both viewpoints at the debate's end. But some
40 years after the book's publication, Japan
followed the Champion's course. After their
defeat in World War 11, the Japanese once
again turned to Chomin's classic, this time
heeding the words of the cautious Gentleman.
Science & Technology
THE BIRTH OF In 1733, British physician George Cheyne pub-

NEUROSIS: lished The English Malady, the first treatise on
Myth, Malady, and the role of the nerves in psychological and be-
the Victorians havioral disorders. But it was at least a century
by George Frederick more before Western physicians attributed ab-
Drinka, M.D.
Simon & Schuster, 1984 normal behavior to nervous conditions rather
431 pp. $21.95 than to such traditional "causes" as an imbal-
ance of humors or mysterious vapors. Drinka, a
Portland, Oregon, psychiatrist, shows how cul-
tural and technological developments in 19th-
century societies supported, even shaped, the
new medical thinking. Exotic personality
myths, derived from literature or from the lives
of famous individuals, influenced scientists and
physicians. The Biblical story of Onan warned
of the dangers of masturbation (e.g., impotence
and homosexuality), while the notion of the
"Noble Savage" emphasized the corrupting
power of the city. All such myths, Drinka says,
embodied "Victorian fears, prejudices, and
CURRENT BOOKS
fantasies." And all the symptoms they de-

scribed came to be associated with neurotic
disorders, stemming from "weak and delicate
nerves, literally stretched or lax." The new
electronic technology reinforced increasingly
popular notions of "frayed" or "overcharged"
nerves. Some neurologists, including Ameri-
can George Beard (who coined the term "neu-
rasthenic" in the 1880s), used electric current
to treat their patients-effecting, in many
cases, cures that still defy scientific explana-
tion. With anecdotes, portraits of notable phy-
sicians, and histories of famous cases, Drinka
shows how a world almost picturesque in its
assortment of rarefied nervous maladies was
virtually brought to an end by Sigmund
Freud. His psychoanalytical theory narrowed
the meaning of neurosis, making it "ultimately
bound to human sexuality ."
ANIMAL THINKING "No truth appears to me more evident,"

by Donald R. Griffin wrote the philosopher David Hume in 1739,
Harvard, 1984 "than that beasts are endow'd with thought
237 pp. $17.50 and reason as well as men." Evident, per-
haps; but Griffin, a Rockefeller University
professor, is rare in thinking that there are
good scientific reasons for agreeing with
Hume. For half a century at least, most scien-
tists have endorsed the behaviorist view that
animal actions are genetically determined re-
actions, not products of conscious decisions.
Griffin claims that it is genetically "econom-
ical" for animals to be capable of thought. He
ranges throughout the animal kingdom, ana-
lyzing group behavior among lions or com-
munication among ants and pointing out in-
adequacies of the behaviorist hypothesis. For
instance, when a pride of lions hunts, some of
them will act as decoy threats, while others
will wait in hiding. The genetic material re-
quired to "program" such complex decision-
making would be much greater than what
these animals actually possess. Griffin draws
on the most recent research in the field of cog-
nitive science. A key to understanding animal
consciousness, he concludes, is to understand
consciousness in humans first.
The Wilscm Qi~urreri~~/V./imer

1984
138
CURRENT BOOKS
PAPERBOUNDS
MEDICAL THINKING: A Historical ing, he now argued, was not absolute

Preface. By Lester S. King, M.D. Prince- but, rather, the product of language
ton, 1984.336 pp. $1 1.50 ''games." These recollections by five who
knew him (his sister, two pupils, his Rus-
Bloodletting, employed as early as 2500
sian teacher, and a former colleague)
B.C. by Egyptian healers and as late as the
show Wittgenstein to be as flinty, diffi-
19th century by Western physicians, is
cult, and fascinating a person as he was
frequently cited by medical historians
scrupulous and unpredictable a thinker.
"as a symbol for whatever was bad in ear-
"Give up literary criticism," he once said
lier medical practice." But one reason for
to the renowned Cambridge don F. R.
its longevity, argues King, a medical doc-
Leavis, advising him that such work was
tor and former editor of the Journal o f the
beneath a first-rate mind. "Such a strong
American Medical Association, is that de-
personality could not fit smoothly and
spite harmful effects and misapplications
easily into every community," wrote his
it often worked, especially on maladies
sister (whose house Wittgenstein had de-
that today would be diagnosed as vascu-
signed when he was between jobs). "But
lar congestion and high blood pressure.
what a stimulus one received from every
Sound medical thinking, it appears, re-
conversation one had with him.''
mains constant, despite leaps in technol-
ogy and information. Concentrating on
the treatment of tuberculosis (formerly BEYOND A BOUNDARY. By C.L.R.
called consumption) over four centuries, James. Pantheon, 1984.257 pp. $8.95
King distinguishes two main types of
physicians: the empiric, who knows from "What do they know of cricket who only
experience which treatments often work, cricket know?" asks James in what was
and the scientist, who goes beyond the heralded, shortly after its 1963 publica-
data and prevailing theories to "listen to tion, as the most important sports book of
the 'still small voice' of critical judg- its time. Even those who know nothing
ment." It is the second group, says King, about the game of cricket will profit from
the Galens and Vesaliuses, that makes this reissue, which conveniently includes
real progress in the healing arts. a n explanation of the game's Byzantine
rules. James, a black Trinidadian, a histo-
RECOLLECTIONS OF WITTGEN- rian, novelist, and teacher, moved to Eng-
land in 1932 and became a leader of the
STEIN. Edited by Rush Rhees. Oxford,
1984.236 pp. $7.95 West Indian nationalist movement a s
well a s cricket correspondent of the
In the Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Lud- Manchester Guardian. No surprise, then,
wig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), the that this book explores the sport's con-
Vienna-born, Cambridge-educated phi- nection with society, politics, and even
losopher, set out to construct a philoso- art. James explains how cricket in the
phy of language as rigorously logical as colonial West Indies diffused social, and
any of the "hard" sciences. In his later particularly racial, unrest. But he also
work, published posthumously in Philo- shows that black players (many of whom
sophical Investigations (1953), he sur- he affectionately portrays) found a de-
prised colleagues, including his former gree of personal dignity a n d freedom
mentor, Bertrand Russell, by seemingly within the "boundary" that they could
repudiating his earlier position: Mean- not find beyond it.
The Wilsoii Quar~erl~IWiriter

1984
139
REFLECTIONS
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was in many ways the 18th-century

Englishman writ large-gruff but good hearted, independent,
honest, deeply traditional and conservative in his values but
bold in defending them, full of practical wisdom and good sense.
Above all, though, he was a man of letters. Like Edmund Wilson
in our time, he did not confine himself to one field of interest or
to one literary form but took all writing as his province. After
long struggles with poverty, including an unsuccessful stint as a
schoolmaster near his native Lichfield, Staffordshire, and many
years of underpaid journalistic hackwork in London, Johnson
made his reputation by compiling, almost single-handedly, the
first major English Dictionary (1755). He also distinguished
himself as a poet, essayist, and novelist, and is still ranked,
along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as one of England's two
greatest literary critics. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson,
LL.D. (1789) preserved for posterity what many fortunate con-
temporaries knew firsthand-the brilliance of Dr. Johnson's
conversation. Here, on the 200th anniversary of Johnson's
death, Lawrence Lipking considers the significance, to those
who knew and venerated him, of the great man's passing.
by Lawrence Lipking
December 13, 1784. As Samuel Johnson prepared to die in his Lon-

don residence at No. 8, Bolt Court, a number of people took an unusual
interest in how he would meet his end. "The death of Johnson," accord-
ing to Arthur Murphy, a contemporary writer and actor, "kept the pub-
lic mind in agitation beyond all former example."
Several reasons may be offered for this keen and perhaps morbid
state of excitement. To begin with, no English author had ever been
more of a celebrity. His admirers today call the late 18th century the
Age of Johnson, and many of his contemporaries would have agreed

140
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Samuel Johnson at age

60, from the etching by
Mrs. Dawson Turner,
about 1825, after a
painting by Ozias
Humphry. Johnson
outlived his wife, the
former Elizabeth Por-
ter, who died in 1752.
with the woman who used to tell "how the world of literature was per-
plexed and distressed-as a swarm of bees that have lost their queen-
when Dr. Johnson died." While the great man lay dying, Fleet Street
snoops prowled around his house, hoping to get their hands on some-
thing newsworthy. Meanwhile, a handful of more respectable biogra-
phers-among them James Boswell, Sir John Hawkins, and Mrs.
Hester Thrale Piozzi-gathered their notes and waited for their time.
Johnson's death, like Johnson's life, would soon belong to literature.
Moreover, 18th-century readers tended to be fascinated by death
scenes. Many biographers (though Johnson was not one of them) ar-
ranged their narratives around the last words of their subjects, hoping
to reveal the state of the soul at the moment of its passing. A great man
ought to die well. Naturally many of the great or would-be great re-
hearsed their deaths carefully. The essayist Joseph Addison, for in-
stance, called in a loose-living young nobleman, whom he had been
trying to convert, to listen to these words: "I have sent for you, that you
may see how a Christian can die." The point was especially sharp be-
cause Addison had written a famous tragedy about Cato, whose suicide
represents the best that a noble pagan can do. Such stories are not easy
to top. Indeed, one might say that an atmosphere had been created that
The Wilson QuarterlyIWinier 1984

141
SAMUEL JOHNSON
encouraged competitive dying. Boswell himself kept a scorecard. He

was anxious that Johnson should die at least as well as the philosopher
David Hume, who in his last hours had cheerfully maintained his utter
lack of belief in any afterlife, to Boswell's dismay. (Johnson himself had
refused to believe that Hume was being sincere.) An atheist could not
be allowed to overmatch a Christian. Hence a good death for Johnson
was more than a matter of personal happiness. In the eyes of his follow-
ers, it was his public duty.
Yet another reason for curiosity was that the dying man himself
had thought so much and spoken so well about death. (The recent Ox-
ford Book of Death quotes Johnson more times than any author except
Shakespeare). As becomes a pious Christian, Johnson's writings con-
sistently put their hope in divine mercy and stress the usefulness of
thinking about mortality: "Nothing confers so much ability to resist
the temptations that perpetually surround us, as an habitual consid-
eration of the shortness of life."
But those who knew the man knew the intensity of his fear. Bos-
well, who shared that terror of death and even exacerbated it in order
better to portray Johnson, organized much of his Life of Johnson
around the suspense of whether the hero could master his fear in the
end. The scenes are among the most memorable in literature. Here is
Johnson in a Colosseum of the mind, battling his apprehensions like
wild beasts; here is Johnson confessing his dread to some kindly, good
people: "JOHNSON. 'I am afraid I may be one of those who shall be
damned.' (Looking dismally.) DR. ADAMS. 'What do you mean by
damned?' JOHNSON (passionately and loudly). 'Sent to hell, Sir, and
punished everlastingly! "'
It is not only Boswell's art that lets us perceive this terror. Much
less imaginative people saw it too. Thus the popular religious writer
Hannah More, only six months before the end, was "grieved to find that
his mind is still a prey to melancholy, and that the fear of death oper-
ates on him to the destruction of his peace. It is grievous-it is unac-
countable!" Johnson's last days would provide this drama with its
finishing stroke. Would visions of hell pursue him to the grave, or
would he submit in peace?
There is a better, less morbid reason, however, why so many people
cared about Johnson's death. To put it simply: He was the expert on
life. Johnson's greatness is not quite like that of any other English au-
thor. His reputation does not rest on a few masterpieces but on the view
of life-the wisdom-that informs almost everything he wrote. John-
Lawrence Lipking, 50, a Wilson Center Fellow, is professor o f English at

Northwestern University. Born i n New York City, he received his B.A. (1955)
from Western Reserve and his Ph.D. (1962) from Cornell University. He is
the author of The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England (1970)
and The Life of the Poet (1981). Copyright 0 1984 by Lawrence Lipking.

142
SAMUEL JOHNSON
son is not among the greatest English poets, though he wrote some
magnificent poems; his standing as a novelist is even lower, though
Rasselas (1759) is one of the few works of fiction that improve with
every re-reading; as a playwright, Johnson merits but passing recogni-
tion. Lexicographers admire the achievement of the Dictionary but
deny that it had much originality or much influence on the language;
literary critics acknowledge the power of his judgments but usually cite
them in order to disagree. Ever since Boswell, biographers have paid
lip service to the principles of "him who excelled all mankind in writ-
ing the lives of others" and then have done something completely dif-
ferent. Political theorists seldom read his writings, and politicians and
editorial writers quote them out of context. Many scholars think that
the essential Johnson is to be found in his periodical essays, especially
the 208 numbers of the Rambler (1750-52). But far from popularizing
the form, he more or less finished it off; and only specialists now know
more than a handful of the essays.
Evidently we must look somewhere outside literature for this

writer's importance. To many readers, then as now, what mattered
most about Johnson was what he had told them about how to live. He
was a sage and adviser, a moralist whose mind was free from cant, a
great man who cared about the daily problems of common people. That
was why they cared about him; and that was why they wondered how
he would die.
What was Johnson's wisdom on the subject of death? From one
point of view, he had little to say, or, at any rate, little consolation to of-
fer. He never pretended that he was not afraid to die or that he pos-
sessed some formula for easing that fear. Christianity might help
believers by counseling, for the sake of salvation, the necessity of hope
rather than of despair. But Christianity had also promised eternal pain
to the wicked, and only the very serene or very deluded would count
themselves among the saved. Indeed, "the better a man is, the more
afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity." Some
people might "think they feel in themselves the marks of sanctifica-
tion"; others might manage an air of resolution by not thinking at all,
or by a vanity so strong as to disguise their true feelings. But these were
not Johnson's ways. No rational moral creature could look into the fu-
ture or know what fate had been decreed by God, and on sacred topics
that we do not understand we had better be silent. Johnson believed he
would have to die without guarantees.
If Johnson's wisdom was inadequate to cope with death, he never-
theless had many acute things to say about the fear of death. The prov-
ince of the moralist was not the afterlife but life itself, the hold of
thoughts of death upon the mind. We live in the shadow of dying. When
Boswell asked whether the fear of death were "natural to man," John-
son replied, "So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away
the thought of it." From this point of view, the idea of death provides a
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Johnson and Boswell walking the streets of Edinburgh. Boswell's Scotland

was often the target of Johnson's jests: "The noblest prospect which a
Scotchman ever sees is the high-road that leads him to England."
key to behavior; it is a universal explanation or perpetual silent com-
mentary on the passing scene.
Johnson was known for talking to himself, sometimes even in com-
pany. Friends who came near could often hear him murmuring some
line from Measure for MeasureÃ‘UAy but to die and go we know not
where; I To lie in cold obstruction and to rot . . ." or from Paradise
LostÃ‘i'Wh would lose, 1 Though full of pain, this intellectual being?"
or even the Lord's Prayer. We might consider this eccentric. Yet accord-
ing to Johnson's own analysis, it only brings to the surface an inner
monologue in which most of us are engaged, whether or not we know it,
most of the time. A good moralist can always pierce through the trap-
pings and hear this voice. Johnson's ears were especially attuned to it.
The consciousness of death, as Johnson sees it, affects life in two
closely related ways. First, it has the benefit of reminding us that life is
precious and not to be wasted. One of Johnson's most famous remarks
concerns the execution of the Reverend William Dodd: "Depend upon
it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concen-
trates his mind wonderfully." But the principle applies as well to the
rest of us, who are only under a longer stay of execution.
Johnson tended to concentrate his own mind particularly well at
Easter, when the sense of last things and the approaching night stim-
ulated him to undertake ambitious new projects. But all times are
suitable for such reflections. To some extent, in fact, the knowledge
The Wilsot~Quarterly/Winter 1984

144
SAMUEL JOHNSON
that we are to die might be considered the saving grace of humanity;

it keeps us, Johnson believed, from being too much enchanted by
w h a t is passing. "Whatever withdraws us from the power of our
senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predomi-
nate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings."
Hence, the thought of death makes everyone dignified. The shadow it
casts on life draws our eyes up in search of something higher. Even
the least sensitive person feels a twinge in the presence of death; and
the best people never forget it.
On the other hand, as Johnson well knew, the thought of death can
also make life seem absurd. From the standpoint of eternity, the little
ways we pass our day, the choice of one toy or profession over another,
do not seem very important. Some minds may be shocked awake by re-
calling that they will die; others may sink into lethargy or simply stop
listening. Johnson was acutely aware of this problem. One of his earli-
est publications is a long attack on a short epitaph, the words that the
poet John Gay chose for his monument:
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.
"Mr. Gay," Johnson comments, "has returned from the regions of death
not much improved in his poetry, and very much corrupted in his mor-
als; for he is come back with a lie in his mouth, Life is a jest."
The ferocity of this response shows that a nerve has been touched.
Johnson, like other authors, cared a good deal about epitaphs. In an
early essay he emphasizes that they are written less for the dead than
for the living, as a means of persuading them to take life seriously: "As
honours are paid to the dead in order to incite others to the imitation of
their excellencies, the principal intention of epitaphs is to perpetuate
the examples of virtue. . . . Those epitaphs are, therefore, the most per-
fect which set virtue in the strongest light, and are best adapted to exalt
the reader's ideas, and rouse his emulation." By this standard, Gay
surely fails. He tempts the reader to smile in Westminster Abbey.
Johnson did not think life a jest. Yet at times he did think it a
dream or perhaps a bubble. Such ideas inevitably intrude upon a
mind that has brooded on the vanity of human wishes and the fragil-
ity of human achievements. Death refutes all pride. Moreover, the in-
sistence on thinking about death less as a state in itself than as a
commentary on life, less as the rounding off of a destiny than as the ir-
resistible eruption of the unknown into our affairs, tends to expose the
-
foolishness of the living.
The threat of satire hovers over many of Johnson's accounts of the
deaths of illustrious men. It is then that we see most clearly the dispar-
ity between their immortal hopes and the human condition, a disparity
that can be comical as well as pathetic. The effect seems especially
strong in his last great work, the Lives o f the English Poets (1779-81).
Johnson had always regarded authors as subject to delusions of gran-
deur; before he had published a word he wrote a poem about "The

145
SAMUEL JOHNSON
A JOHNSON SAMPLER
Whig historian Thomas Macaulay judged James Boswell's Life of

Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1789) "the most interesting biographical work
in the world." Herewith, a sampling of what Boswell recorded of John-
son's wit and wisdom:
On the writing of his Dictionary:

"ADAMS. 'But, sir, how can you do this in three years?' JOHN-
SON. 'Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years.' ADAMS.
'But the French Academy, which consists of 40 members, took 40
years to compile their dictionary.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, thus it is. This is
the proportion. Let me see; 40 times 40 is 1600. As three is to 1600 so
is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."'
On lawyers:
"Much inquiry having been made concerning a gentleman who
had quitted a company where Johnson was, and no information
being obtained, at last Johnson observed that 'he did not care to
speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman
was an attorney."'
On corporal punishment:
"There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but
then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they
lose at the other."
On the company of young people:
"Sir, I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first
place, I don't like to think myself growing old. In the next place,
young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, sir,
young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous
sentiments in every respect. I love the young dogs of this age, they
have more wit and humour and knowledge of life than we had, but
then the dogs are not so good scholars. . . ."
On little things:
"There is nothing, sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is
by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as
little misery and as much happiness as possible."
On the expulsion of religious proselytizers from Oxford:
"JOHNSON. 'Sir, that expulsion was extremely just and proper.
What have they to do at a university, who are not willing to be
taught, but will presume to teach? Where is religion to be learnt but
at a university? Sir, they were examined, and found to be mighty ig-
SAMUEL JOHNSON
norant fellows.' BOSWELL. 'But, was it not hard, sir, to expel them,
for I am told they were good beings?' JOHNSON. 'I believe they
might be good beings; but they were not fit to be in the University of
Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out
of a garden.'"
O n the vanity of a famous actor:
"No wonder, sir, that he is vain; a man who is
perpetually flattered in every mode that can be
conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire,
that one wonders he is not by this time become a
cinder."
O n a certain female political writer:
"It having been mentioned, I know not with
what truth, that a certain female political
writer, whose doctrine he disliked, had of late
become very fond of dress, sat hours together at
her toilet, and even put on rouge:-JOHNSON.
'She is better employed a t her toilet, than using
her pen. It is better she should be reddening her
own cheeks, than blackening other people's ;8
characters.'"
O n knowledge:
"The foundation (said he) must be laid by
reading. General principles must be had from
books which, however, must be brought to the
test of real life. In conversation you never get a system. What is said
upon a subject is to be gathered from a hundred people. The parts of
a truth, which a man gets thus, are at such a distance from each
other that he never attains to a full view."
O n a widower marrying a second time:
"When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a
second time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, 'Not at
all, sir. On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be con-
cluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by
taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by
showing that she made him so happy as a married man that he
wishes to be so a second time."'
O n friendship:
"To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly
not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts
of this weary pilgrimage."
The Wilson QuarterlyIIVi~~ter

1984
147
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Young Author," "panting for a name," who swiftly "sees the imagin'd
laurels spread" but is immediately damned by critics and stops writ-
ing, "Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot."
At the end of his life, this dire prognostication had not improved.
While many of his contemporaries recorded or invented instructive last
words, Johnson freshened his sense of irony. "The death of great men is
not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. Hannibal, says the
Roman poet Juvenal, did not perish by a javelin or a sword; the slaugh-
ters of Cannae were revenged by a ring. The death of Alexander Pope
was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was
his delight to heat potted lampreys."
Not many of the English poets die well, as Johnson tells their
stories. It is not that he means to be cruel. Rather, the truth requires
that they depart like other people, in poverty and disappointment, in
slow decline, or while their minds are busy with something else. That is
how death happens in real life, as he sees it-often unexpectedly, and
seldom according to a neat plot.
"Who knows if Jove who counts our Score 1 Will toss us in a morn-
ing more?" The lines come from Horace; when Johnson translated
them from Latin, he did not know that he had only a month to live.
That is part of the point; the poem itself denies that poets can see the fu-
ture. Most good deaths are shaped retrospectively, just as famous last
words depend on not being followed by others. (If Addison had contin-
ued to live after his bon mot, he would presumably have been quite em-
barrassed.) Such stories are products of art. But Johnson, despite his
respect for art, prefers to think about life, and all we can know for cer-
tain about death consists of its effects upon life and particularly upon
the mind, where life is experienced. The rest is wishful thinking. John-
son, more than any other author, founds his career on a war against
wishful thinking.
Thus he did not smooth the path to his own death. Johnson's last
days and words were not rehearsed, and they lack the finish of a satis-
fying tale. There would be no deathbed conversions. Some evidence
suggests, in fact, that in the last year of his life Johnson may have had
a conversion experience like those on which the Evangelicals staked
their hopes. If so, it did not make him serene. He was much more in-
terested in prolonging his life than in going quietly to his reward. Nor
do we find in Johnson, either in his writings or in his conversation,
that tendency to look back on a career as if from the grave, that fasci-
nation with one's own obituary, in which so many successful people
indulge. Revisiting the stream where he swam as a boy, he notes (in a
beautiful Latin poem) not how far he has come but only that the water
continues to flow.
How then did Johnson die? The answer, as he would have pre-
dicted, depends on who is telling the story. Nobody writes the ac-
count of his own death scene (though some authors, like Swift, may

148
SAMUEL JOHNSON
enjoy picturing it ahead of time). The moment of death is, after all, an
intensely private experience, and what the central character is really
thinking must remain his secret. "Inquiries into the heart are not for
man," Johnson wrote of poet John Dryden's motives in converting to
Catholicism, "We must now leave him to his Judge." Hence the signif-
icance of a great man's last act, still more than his biography, will be
interpreted by and for the living, according to their own interests. The
pressure to make the story come out right weighs especially heavily
when the subject, like Johnson, stands for his age and the faith it most
cherishes. Survivors demand confirmation of what they believe or
what they want to believe. Under the circumstances, Johnson had no
choice but to die well.
Nevertheless, the facts support more than one interpretation.
Many people attended the great man on his deathbed, and the anec-
dotes they brought back vary according to what they wanted to hear,
what Johnson wanted to tell them, and the expectations of those to
whom they reported. Thus Hannah More, who had worried so much
about Johnson's despondency, was relieved to learn (at third hand) that
he had spent his final hours trying to convert his physician to the one
true faith. "My dear doctor," Johnson had said, "there is no salvation

149
SAMUEL JOHNSON
but in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God." Miss More draws a pious con-
clusion: "No action of his life became him like the leaving it. . . . It is de-
lightful to see him set, as it were, his dying seal to the professions of his
life, and to the truth of Christianity."
Others found similar morals. As often happens, Johnson's "official"
last words were staged. A young lady entered the room to ask his bless-
ing; he turned in bed and said, "God bless you, my dear!" We do not
know what train of thought she may have interrupted. In fact these
were not Johnson's last words. A short while later, according to one
eyewitness account, given some warm milk in a cup, he said something
upon its not being properly given into his hand. But no biographer has
found it useful to end there.
The fullest story appears in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Bos-
well had not been present during the last days of his hero, but he
needed some resolution to the brilliant earlier scenes about Johnson's
fear of death. There were many documents to choose from. Making a
virtue of necessity, the Life does not pretend to enter its hero's mind
and allows him to go quietly. The deathbed scene is handled with re-
straint. But two other documents flank it, and they make the difference.
The first is a prayer by Johnson, composed eight days before he died:
"Support me, by thy Holy Spirit, in the days of weakness, and at the
hour of death; and receive me, at my death, to everlasting happiness,
for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen."
The second suggests that the prayer was answered. A letter re-
ports the impressions of a servant who sat with Johnson on his last
morning, and said "that no man could appear more collected, more
devout, or less terrified a t the thoughts of the approaching minute."
This "agreeable" account "has given us the satisfaction of thinking
that that great man died as he lived, full of resignation, strengthened
in faith, and joyful in hope." Q.E.D. Boswell proceeds to the tributes
and character sketch. Johnson had died with dignity-a hero to the
last, triumphant over himself.
Is there any reason to doubt this comforting story? It is certainly
what most readers want and need; and I would not deny that it tells
the truth-or at least a truth-about Johnson. But another, darker
version also rings true. It was told by Johnson's executor and first bi-
ographer, Sir John Hawkins, a famously harsh and unclubable man,
one justly accused of lacking charity. Yet Hawkins did have one ad-
vantage in talking about the scene of Johnson's death: Much of the
time he was there. Like others, he witnessed the end of a Christian, but
one who "strictly fulfilled the injunction of the apostle, to work out
his salvation with fear and trembling." Hawkins's version is anything
but consoling; it quivers with restless passion. The last words, accord-
ing to him, were " l a m moriturus" (I who am about to die), an adapta-
tion of the Roman gladiators' salute to Caesar, as if Johnson were still
facing his beasts. But Hawkins concludes with a far more terrible

150
SAMUEL JOHNSON
scene. Bloated with dropsy, Johnson tries to discharge the water by

stabbing his legs with scissors until they are covered with blood. He
even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.
"Deeper, deeper-I will abide the consequence: you are afraid of your
reputation, but that is nothing to me." And then Hawkins records one
more saying of Johnson, perhaps the most aggressive last words in the
canon: "To those about him, he said,-'You all pretend to love me,
but you do not love.me so well as I myself do."'
It is not the sort of thing dying people say, by convention; nor does
it contain the whole Johnson. Yet a part of Johnson is there: a man of
courage; a man who speaks the truth even when we would rather not
hear it; and a man who clings to life with such fierceness that all about
him pale. These are the last words, I think, that suit Johnson best. Many
great men have died better and nobler deaths; many authors have
tamed death with better words. But only a few have managed to be so
honest. Those are the authors whose work lives on.
The 1~VilsoiiQuaner/s/IViluer1984
151
vation in economic policy-developing
We welcome timely letters from readers, and assessing strategies for a healthier,
especially those who wish to amplify or cor- more skilled, more long-lived and capa-
rect information published in the Quarterly ble populace with access to steady, pro-
and/or react to the views expressed in our ductive jobs; 3) the new leadership
essays. The writer's telephone number and generation-whether and how those now
address should be included. For reasons of coming to power in politics, culture, and
space, letters are usually edited for publica- economic life will affirm the pacts of ci-
tion. Some o f those printed below were re- vility and compromise so central to Vene-
ceived in response to the editors' requests zuela's democracy.
for comment. A final note: Linda S. Robinson's fine
survey of background books misses a few
titles that deserve wider attention. Any-
one seriously interested in the formation
That Old Melody of modem Venezuela must read R6mulo
Betancourt's Venezuela's Oil (Oxford,
Reading Robert Bond and David Blank 1978). And two recent histories are John
on Venezuela [ W Q , Autumn 19841 was a Lombardi's Venezuela: The Search for
lot like hearing a favorite old song: pleas- Order, the Dream of Progress (Oxford,
ant but frustrating. 1982) and Judith Ewell's Venezuela: A
It is pleasing to see more attention Century of Change (Stanford, 1984).
given to Venezuela, which despite its
problems is surely one of Latin America's Daniel H . h i n e
notable success stories. It is encouraging Professor of Political Science
to be reminded that there are places in University of Michigan
the region where democracy is the rule, Ann Arbor, Michigan
not the exception. But I was frustrated as
well. North American and Venezuelan ob- Wry Comparisons
servers have played the same tune for
decades now. Perhaps it is time to strike Hugh Trevor-Roper diminishes Scottish
out in different directions. tradition and the kilts as imports and re-
The strengths of Venezuelan democ- cent contrivances ["The Highlander
racy are well known: no significant ethnic Myth," W Q , S u m m e r 19841. It is wry
or linguistic splits, intense social change t h a t he sees 300 years a s juvenile, or
with high and orderly political participa- homespun as false, if it is not homemade
tion, strong organization, and effective from scratch.
leadership. Also familiar are the mixed ef- Ah, the English! Would the judgment
fects of resource abundance with contin- be the same if we asked about the Church
ued inefficiency and inequality. These of England?
elements make the Venezuela that faces Kilts are to be compared with innocu-
us today. ous English fancies such as cricket and
It is unlikely, however, that the future warm beer.
will hold simply more of the same. In any No matter, I claim. Scottish tradition
case, it cannot be well understood by does not rest on fancy pants. We have a
mere extrapolation from the forces that panoply of traditions, including the pres-
created the democracy we know. The fu- tigious and the charming, the old and the
ture is rooted in the new economy, social recent: witness Scottish law, Duns Sco-
structure, democratic culture, and in the tus, the Stone of Scone. We even take Ar-
vibrant, open politics that democracy it- nold Toynbee's Scottish diaspora as part
self has created in Venezuela since 1958. of our heritage, although this was, in
If we are to understand the dynamics of part, created under English auspices after
that future, new phenomena must be ad- the rebellion of 1745. Clannish tradition
dressed. Three seem especially signifi- this, but this time with a vengeance.
cant: I) the democratization of culture
and society-the content of popular cul- Alex McDonald
ture, changes in association life; 2) inno- Stamford, Connecticut

COMMENTARY
Princess or Pauper?
Jan S. Breemer
I enjoyed Frank McConnell's piece on
Wallace Stevens [ W Q , Summer 19841,
but I think he is wrong on one important
point: his assertion that "The Emperor of
Ice-Cream" is a poem about a wealthy
lady. On the following evidence, I have al-
ways assumed that she is poor: a cigar
roller will prepare food for the wake;
wenches will dawdle in ordinary clothes;
the boys will bring the floral offerings in
last month's newspapers; the dresser in
her bedroom is made of deal (a cheap
wood), and three of its knobs are missing. An informed overview of our complex Navy in
She was the kind of woman who embroid- the throes of significant modernization. 288 pages,
ered her own sheets. 160 photos. $19.95
All of this suggested poverty to me, not New Third Edition
wealth. But I was always puzzled by the aval mited by
exotic details, such as a cigar roller. Re- Developments Norman Polmar
cently, a poet friend told me of a conver- A concise and up-to-the-minute presentation
sation with Elizabeth Bishop. Like of the world's fastest growing navy. 138 pages,
Stevens, a frequent visitor to Key West, over 170 photos and drawings. $16.95
MasterCord and Visa orders accepted. Write so address below or
Miss Bishop spoke of this poem as Ste- call (3011 659-0220. Add $2.00 for each book ordered 10 cover
vens's best Key West poem. Therefore, shipping and handling. Maryland residents please add 5% sales
what seemed exotic (the cigar roller) was tax.
The Nautical & Aviation
a n ordinary character in the Key West Publishing Co. of America
that Stevens knew. Such ordinariness 101-WQ W. Read St., Suite 224
and the poverty of the characters seem al- Annapolis, MD 21201
together consonant with the meaning of
the poem.
Richard Boatwight
Editor, S h e n a n d o a h
Lexington, Virginia
Volunteer Views
I must take issue with the assertion by the
reviewer of My Dear Parents in the Sum-
mer 1984 Quarterly that Private Horrocks,
"like most of his fellow volunteers" in the
Union Army, was indifferent to the Union
cause and gave little thought to the issues
of slavery and secession. While it is prob-
ably true that most Union volunteers
were not abolitionists, there is strong evi-
dence that many, perhaps most, volun-
teers did have a sense of patriotism
among their reasons for enlisting.
Any student of the Civil War who goes
through large collections of private let-
ters can only come away with the feeling
COMMENTARY
Authors...
that, along with a desire for adventure,
the attraction of the pay, and other moti-
vations, patriotism loomed large. As for
secession, although some Union soldiers,
especially draftees, held a "let the South
go in peace" attitude, most volunteers
saw secession as a law-and-order issue.
Contemporary cynicism about patri-
otism should not distort our perception
of the past. Patriotic motives were very
real in 1861.
William L. Burton
Professor of History
Western Illinois University
Macomb, Illinois
You are invited to send for a free illus-

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ADDRESS
Robert D.Cunningham
Tucson, Arizona
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155
WILSON QUARTERLY B I E N N I A L INDEX
Volumes VII and VIII (New Year's 1983 through Winter 1984)
I n alphabetical order below is a guide to separate articles by title and when neces-
sary by subject (in boldface), clusters of essays on given topics (set out by capital
letters), and all authors appearing in the Quarterly in 1983-84.
Adams, Henry, Autumn '83: In Defense of Hen- Burgess, Anthony, Music and Literature, Winter
ry Adams, T. J. Jackson Lears, 82 '83, 86
Adams, Willi Paul, A Dubious Host, N a v Year's
'83, 100 Causes of Wars (The), Michael Howard, Sum-
AMERICA'S NATIONAL SECURITY, Winter mer '84, 90
'83: The View from the Kremlin, David Hollo- Chaiken, Jan M. and Marcia R., Trends and
way, 102; The Uneasy Alliance: Western Targets, Spring '83, 102
Europe and the United States, Edward A. Changing Frontiers, John Barker, New Year's
Kolodziej and Robert A. Pollard, 112; Limits on '83, 88
the Use of American Military Power, Samuel F.
Wells, Jr., 121; The Human Element, Charles C. Chinese Science after Mao, Richard Baum,
Moskos, Jr., and Peter Braestrup, 131; Back- Spring '83, 156
ground Books, 138 Confessions of a Wild Bore, John Updike, Win-
Arsenault, Raymond, The Cooling of the South, ter '83, 168
Summer '84, 150 The Cooling of the South, Raymond Arsenault,
Avineri, Shlomo, The Roots of Zionism, New Summer '84, 150
Year's '83, 46 Cranston, Maurice, Rousseau and the Ideology
of Liberation, New Year's '83, 146
BALKANS
(The), New Year's '84: David Binder, CRIME, Spring '83: Trends and Targets, Jan M.
118; Background Books, 144 Chaiken and Marcia R. Chaiken, 102; Coping
Barker, John, Changing Frontiers, New Year's with Justice. 116; Families and Crime, Travis
'83, 88 Hirschi, 132; Background Books, 140
Baum, Richard, Chinese Science after Mao, Culbert, David, Presidential Images, New
Spring '83, 156 Year's '83. 158
Bellows, Thomas J., Big Fish, Small Pond, Win-
ter '83, 66 D e a t h and Life of Samuel Johnson (The),
Lawrence Lipking, Winter '84, 140
Betts, Richard K., Misadventure Revisited,
Summer '83, 94 Doyle, Denis P., Window of Opportunity, New
Year's '84, 91
Binder, David, THE BALKANS, New Year's '84,
118
E a s t l a n d , Terry, Redefining Civil Rights,
BLACKS IN AMERICA, Spring '84: The Second Spring '84,60
Reconstruction, Harvard Sitkoff, 48; Redefin-
ing Civil Rights, Terry Eastland, 60; Moving The Education of Walker Percy, Jay Tolson,
Up, Gary Puckrein, 74; The Black Underclass, Spring '84, 156
William Julius Wilson, 88; Background Books, Erasmus, Desiderius, Spring '83: In Praise of
100 (Correction: See Autumn '84, 175) Erasmus, Paul F. Grendler, 88
Blank, David E., 'Sowing the Oil,' Autumn '84, ETHIOPIA, Winter '84: Paul B. Henze, 98; Back-
63 ground Books, 125
Bond, Robert D., Where Democracy Lives,
Autumn '84, 48 Fallenbuchl, Zbigniew, Command Perform-
Boorstin, Daniel J., The Lost Arts of Memory, ance, Spring '83, 69
Spring '84, 104 Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr's
Braestrup, Peter, and Charles C. Moskos, Jr., 'Revolution,' Autumn '84, 82
The Human Element, Winter '83, 131
BRAZIL, Summer '83: Staying the Course, Rior- Galilee's Science and the Trial of 1633, Wil-
dan Roett, 46; The New Frontier, Brian J. Kelly liam A. Wallace, Summer '83, 154
and Mark London, 62; Background Books, 77 Glad, John, Brave New Worlds, Autumn '83, 68
The Broker State, Otis L. Graham, Jr., Winter, Graham, Otis L., Jr., The Broker State, Winter
'84, 86 '84, 86

156
INDEX
Graham, Patricia Albjerg, Wanting I t All, New London, Mark, and Brian J. Kelly, The New
Year's '84, 46 Frontier, Summer '83, 62
The Great Soviet Computer Conspiracy, Walter The Lost Arts of Memory, Daniel J. Boorstin,
Reich, Spring '84, 167 Spring '84, 104
Grendler, Paul F., In Praise of Erasmus, Spring
'83, 88 Matusow, Alien J., John F. Kennedy and the
Intellectuals, Autumn '83, 140
Henriksson, Anders, A History of the Past: McConnell, Frank D., The Suburbs of Camelot,
'Life Reeked with Joy,' Spring '83, 168 Summer '83, 80; Understanding Wallace
Henze, Paul B., ETHIOPIA, Winter '84, 98 Stevens, Summer '84, 160
Hirschi, Travis, Families and Crime, Spring '83, Meyer, Lawrence, Into the Breach? New Year's
132 '83, 81
A History of the Past: 'Life Reeked with Joy,' MGM Meets the Atomic Bomb, Nathan Rein-
Anders Henriksson, Spring '83, 168 gold, Autumn '84, 154
Hollick, Ann L., Managing the Oceans, Summer Miedzyrzecki, Artur, After the Earthquake,
'84, 70 Spring '83, 77
Holloway, David, The View from the Kremlin, THE MIND, Winter '84: Is This Cat Necessary?
Winter '83, 102 Richard M. Restak, 48; Reinventing Psycholo-
gy, Robert J . Sternberg, 60; Thinking
Howard, Michael, The Causes of Wars, Summer Machines, Robert Wright, 72; Background
'84,90 Books, 84
Morris, Edmund, Telling Lives, Summer '83,
IMMIGRATION, New Year's '83: A Dubious 165
Host, Willi Paul Adams, 100; The Half-Open
Door, Aaron Segal, 116; Background Books, 130 The Mosher Affair, Peter Van Ness, New Year's
'84, 160
I n Defense of Henry Adams, T. J . Jackson
Lears, Autumn '83, 82 Moskos, Charles C., Jr., and Peter Braestrup,
The Human Element, Winter '83, 131
In Praise of Erasmus, Paul F. Grendler, Spring
'83, 88 Murray, Charles, THE WAR ON POVERTY:
1965-1980, Autumn '84,94
ISRAEL, New Year's '83: The Roots of Zionism,
Shiomo Avineri, 46; A Different Place, Don Music and Literature, Anthony Burgess, Winter
Peretz, 62; Into the Breach? Lawrence Meyer, '83, 86
81; Background Books, 85
Niebuhr, Reinhold, Autumn '84: Reinhold
John F. Kennedy and the Intellectuals, Allen J. Niebuhr's 'Revolution,' Richard Wightman
Matusow, Autumn '83, 140 Fox, 82
Johnson, Samuel, Winter '84: The Death and NORWAY, Spring '84: Paradise Retained,
Life of Samuel Johnson, Lawrence Lipking, 140 Robert Wright, 114; Coping with Oil, 130;
Background Books, 140 (Correction: See Au-
tumn '84, 175)
Kelly, Brian J., and Mark London, The New
Frontier, Summer '83, 62
Kennedy, John F., Autumn '83: John F. Ken- OCEANS (The), Summer '84: Science and the
nedy and the Intellectuals, Allen J. Matusow, Sea, Susan Schlee, 48; Managing the Oceans,
140 Ann L. Hollick, 70; Background Books, 87
Kolodziej, Edward A,, and Robert A. Pollard, The Origins of English Words, Joseph T. Ship-
The Uneasy Alliance: Western Europe and the ley, Autumn '84, 164
United States, Winter '83, 112 Orwell's 1984: Does Big Brother Really Exist?
Robert C. Tucker. New Year's '84, 106
Lears, T. J. Jackson, I n Defense of Henry
Adams, Autumn '83, 82; The Rise of American Farmer, J. Norman, City of the Lion, Winter
Advertising, Winter '83, 156 '83,48
Limits on the Use of American Military Power, Percy, Walker, Spring '84: The Education of
Samuel F. Wells, Jr., Winter '83, 121 Walker Percy, Jay Tolson, 156
Lipking, Lawrence, The Death and Life of Peretz, Don, A Different Place, New Year's '83,
Samuel Johnson, Winter '84, 140 62

157
INDEX
Pike, Douglas, The Other Side, Summer '83, 114 Worlds, John Glad, 68; Background Books, 79
POLAND, Spring '83: The People versus the Starr, S. Frederick, The Rock Inundation, Au-
Party, Leopold Unger, 48; Command Perform- tumn '83, 58
ance, Zbigniew Fallenbuchl, 69; After the Stevens, Wallace, Summer '84: Understanding
Earthquake, Artur Mi~dzyrzecki,77; Back- Wallace Stevens, Frank D. McConnell, 160 (Cor-
ground Books, 86 rection: See Autumn '84, 174)
Pollard, Robert A., and Edward A. Kolodziej, The Suburbs of Camelot, Frank D. McConnell,
The Uneasy Alliance: Western Europe and the Summer '83, 80
United States, Winter '83, 112
Summers, Harry G., Jr., Lessons: A Soldier's
Poverty, Autumn '84: THE WAR ON POVER- View, Summer '83, 125
TY: 1965-1980, Charles Murray, 94
Sykes, Gary, The Deal, New Year's '84,59
Presidential Images, David Culbert, New Year's
'83, 158
TEACHING
IN AMERICA, New Year's '84:
PSYCHIATRY IN AMERICA, Autumn '83: Wanting It All, Patricia Albjerg Graham, 46;
Richard M . Restak, 94; Background Books, 123 The Deal, Gary Sykes, 59; What Can We Learn
(Correction: See New Year's '84, 174) from Others? Val D. Rust, 78; Window of
Puckrein, Gary, Moving Up, Spring '84, 74 Opportunity, Denis P. Doyle, 91; Background
Books, 102
R a n g e r Terence, The Black Man's Burden, Telling Lives, Edmund Morris, Summer '83,165
Summer '84, 121 Tolson, Jay, The Education of Walker Percy,
Reich, Walter, The Land of Single File, Autumn Spring '84, 156
'83, 47; The Great Soviet Computer Conspira- TRADITIONS, Summer '84: The Highlander
cy, Spring '84, 167 Myth, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 104; The Black
Reingold, Nathan, MGM Meets the Atomic Man's Burden, Terence Ranger, 121; Back-
Bomb, Autumn '84, 154 ground Books, 134
Reinhold Niebuhr's 'Revolution,' Richard Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Highlander Myth,
Wightman Fox, Autumn '84,82 Summer '84, 104
Restak, Richard M., PSYCHIATRY IN AMER- Tucker, Robert C., Orwell's 1984: Does Big
ICA, Autumn '83, 94; Is This Cat Necessary? Brother Really Exist? New Year's '84, 106
Winter '84, 48
The Rise of American Advertising, T. J . Jackson Understanding Wallace Stevens, Frank D.
Lears, Winter '83, 156 McConnell, Summer '84, 160 (Correction: See
Roett, Riordan, Staying the Course, Summer Autumn '84, 174)
'83,46 Unger, Leopold, The People versus the Party,
Spring '83,48
Rousseau and the Ideology of Liberation,
Maurice Cranston, New Year's '83, 146 Updike, John, Confessions of a Wild Bore, Win-
ter '83, 168
Rust, Val D., What Can We Learn from Others?
New Year's '84, 78
V a n Ness, Peter, The Mosher Affair, New Year's
'84, 160
Schlee, Susan, Science and the Sea, Summer
'84, 48 VENEZUELA, Autumn '84: Where Democracy
Lives, Robert D. Bond, 48; 'Sowing the Oil,'
Segal, Aaron, The Half-Open Door, New Year's David E. Blank, 63; Background Books, 79
'83, 116
VIETNAM AS THE PAST, Summer '83: Mis-
Shipley, Joseph T., The Origins of English adventure Revisited, Richard K. Betts, 94; The
Words, Autumn '84, 164 Other Side, Douglas Pike, 114; Lessons: A Sol-
SINGAPORE, Winter '83: City of the Lion, dier's View, Harry G. Summers, Jr., 125; Back-
J. Norman Farmer, 48; Big Fish, Small Pond, ground Books, 136
Thomas J. Bellows, 66; Background Books, 83
Sitkoff, Harvard, The Second Reconstruction, Wallace, William A,, Galilee's Science and the
Spring '84, 48 Trial of 1633, Summer '83, 154
THE SOVIETS, Autumn '83: The Land of THE WAR ON POVERTY: 1965-1980, Autumn
Single File, Walter Reich, 47; The Rock Inun- '84; Charles Murray, 94; Background Books,
dation, S . Frederick Starr, 58; Brave New 137

158
INDEX
Wells, Samuel F.,Jr., Limits on the Use of Israel, N e w Year's '83, 85

American Military Power, Winter '83, 121
Wilson, William Julius, The Black Underclass, The Mind, Winter '84, 84
Spring '84,88 (Correction:See Autumn '84, 175)
Wright, Robert, Paradise Retained, Spring '84, Norway, Spring '84, 140
114; Thinking Machines, Winter '84, 72
The Oceans, Summer '84,87
Poland, Spring '83, 86
BACKGROUND BOOKS Psychiatry in America, Autumn '83, 123
America's National Security, Winter '83, 138 Singapore, Winter '83, 83
The Balkans, New Year's '84, 144 The Soviets, Autumn '83, 79
Blacks in America, Spring '84, 100 Teaching in America, N e w Year's '84, 102
Brazil, Summer '83, 77 Traditions, Summer '84, 134
Crime, Spring '83, 140 Venezuela, Autumn '84, 79
Ethiopia, Winter '84, 125 Vietnam, Summer '83, 136
Immigration, N e w Year's '83, 130 The War on Poverty, Autumn '84, 137
Credits: P.12, Reprinted with permission of Hugh Haynie and The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY;
p. 17, Cartoon from America's Blackand WhiteBook by W. A. Rogers (New York: Cupples & Leon, 1917);
p. 21, Copyright 1981 by Newsweek, Inc. Photograph by Kim Willenson; p. 24, Photograph by Lynn
Forsdale; p. 29, Wide World Photos; p. 34, Copyright, 1981, Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with
permission. All rights reserved.; p. 39, Copyright 1984 by S.P.A.D.E.M., Paris/V.A.G.A., New York;
p. 42, Courtesy of the Egyptian Tourist Authority; p. 46, A.D.A.G.P.; p. 53, Copyright M. C. Escher heirs.
C/O Cordon Art B.V., Baam, Holland; p. 61, Skinner: U.P.I.1Bettmann Archive, Inc.; p. 67, Biology: A
Human Approach, 3rd. ed., by Irwin Sherman and Viiia Sherman, Copyright 1983by Oxford University
Press, Inc. Reprinted with permission.; p. 69, Multimedia Publication Inc. (Miki Koren); p. 78, Drawing
by W. Miller; 0 1983 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.; p. 81, Still photo from 2010, courtesy of
MGMIUA Entertainment Co.; p. 87, Courtesy of AFL-CIO News; p. 98, Peabody Museum of Salem.
Photo by Mark Sexton; p. 116, Keystone Press Agency Inc.; All other Ethiopian illustrations provided
courtesy of Paul B. Henze.; p. 133, Holy Shroud Guild.
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WHAT IS THE HUMAN MIND?

Henry James and the Problem of

The French Enlightenment

The Poet and the City

Athens, Georgia 30602 \

1~~~-0363-3276 VOLUME VIII NUMBER 5

Asia Cable. The newsletter.

A superb writer, he treats his I

"The judicious and incisive headnotes preceding each

is an exemplary work of editing and

1 Including every written communication that passed between Churchill

This is the same heavy duty embosser used by

A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Editor: Peter Braestrup Published in January; March, May, September,and

1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 11 RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY 30

POLITICS & GOVE ENT

"When Money Talks, Is It Democracy?"

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doctors per capita doubled.

"The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins

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"Ultra: Some Thoughts on Its Impact on

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Last year, Japan's Bridgestone Corporation bought a failing Firestone

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