The America Nobody Knows

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 161, 24 July 1942, Page 3

The America Nobody Knows

all intelligent comment on the war that science has outrun morality. But the Americans put it another way. Wars must come, they say, when little men run big machines, and the only way to . stop wars is to get big men on the machines. So it is not altogether a surprise to learn from the latest American newspapers to hand that Stanford University has established a new School of Humanities and has put Lewis Mumford in charge as Professor. The idea of the University is that knowledge is one thing and intelligence another. You cure sickness (perhaps) with science. You remove it with wis-dom-by being too sensible to do the things that make you ill. And while that sounds Utopian to us, Utopia is not just a stale joke at Stanford. Let us, they say there, examine these jokes and find out who makes them. So they are giving Lewis Mumford, a philosopherplanner, a pot of money and a staff of experts and turning him loose on homo sapiens..The problem is to add inches, if not cubits, to our stature; to make us creators again and not merely destroyers; realists and not plain fools. Mumford refuses to believe that we must remain fools. He thinks in fact that it is only a generation or two since we began to drift, since we started gaping at the discoveries of science and forgot our morals and our minds, and that two generations of true education would make us sensible and safe again. Science, which is the-search for knowledge, must go on. But the young must be taken back to "the great masters of reality," who are not, he says, the so-called " practical" men of business and politics, but the men who have shown us what life really is: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Isaiah, Dostoievski, St. Paul. It would be interesting to know what would happen to a Professor in New Zealand who asked for money for the propagation of such a gospel. In America the money is thrown at him. 5. is a commonplace of nearly