Once man's best friend was his dog, today, man's best friend is his wastebasket.
Lunch, May 2, with Rod Rockefeller, at the Jade Cockatoo where I ate my favorite Egg
Foo Young. I brought Ed along to introduce him, and he and Rod found much to talk about regarding the government's loan guarantee program for overseas projects. I showed Rod and Ed the outline and 2 pages of my Statement for a New Political Order. I am working up some enthusiasm for it now, but so many other things are happening and demanding attention that I can only think about the paper and jot down notes on he average of an hour a day. I need a good solid period of work on it, a month to three months just to get the very complicated body of it written down. How can I find the time if I must reorganize Metron this summer and earn an extra $2000 to pay my obligations. Spent Tuesday evening with Vlavianos and am making progress with a plan to merge publishing efforts.Yesterday, I was searching for a book amidst the thousands that fill our basement shelves, and Christopher happened down. "What are you going to do with all these books?" he asked. With pretended sincerity, I replied, "I am saving them so that when you grow older you can read all of them." "I can't read all that!" he said seriously. He pondered a little. "I've read the Wizard of Oz six times ..." "Six times?" "I don't see how I can do it." I laughed.
When the full meaning of operationalism is explored, it would tend to move into my concepts of social invention. Further, I have been too limited in my approach. Not only "hardware" and "natural science" inventions are social, but natural science is social science.. Now this will tie up my theory of science as a branch of administration, responding to the laws of administrative behavior. Hypo - every law of general administration is a law of science (taking science as process). The subjects of administration include the subjects of science! That is, scientific principles (laws of gravity, atomic movement, chemistry, etc.) are administered products. They are social relations described by other social relations, i. e. part of social science. Here is the way philosophy and social theory should be tending. Intellectual reform and control over technology lie here. That old master of clichés, C. P. Snow, outdid himself with his "Two Worlds" of the Humanities and Sciences, which all the boobs applaud. He wants the "two worlds" to talk to each other. If they don't know they are each other, they have nothing to say. Significant that he omits the third world of social science.
May 16, 1962 [Note: It is dated "June 16" but since it is bound in a notebook in sequence,
Ibelieve it should be May 16]
Jill grouchy these days. I hope that she doesn't become a crab. People of her disposition and character can. By contrast, mysteriously to me, after a long talk with Sebastian re A-M's serious symptoms of mental and moral distress, A-M appears bright and congenial for a week. She is painting a portrait of me in profile, enthused I suppose by her success with the first portrait.
Economists are so badly off in theorizing that I wish sometimes to bomb them. I was looking at 2 old 1-franc pieces this noon - John asked me what they were worth. I said less than a penny, and then that how pennies and francs and pfennigs are the dollars of a population that lives in their terms, as another population lives in dollars and in hundreds of dollars. Politics and society can be usefully conceived in group terms, the group being a set of communicants and their communications and shared perspectives. Why should economies be founded on the absurd idea of one market, which is just like the puerile old realistic universal psychology, or politics as the single subject of the political society, or sociology as a society of uniform people, or even of a simple status or class divided people (cf. Marx). The people who walk a mile to pay their light-bills personally and save 1-franc or 1-dime or 1-lire are a people whose economics are apart from all the others in important ways. That is why the penny, the franc, and the lire continue to exist as the bottom of a briskly inflating currency. It remains a real and valuable unit, and the authorities sense unconsciously that they had better leave a rearguard of the "old cost of living" behind as they rush along with the ballooning currencies of the future.
* * * * *
I "tested" Jill on the inventory that the NY "Midtown Mental health" group administered to a sample of 1600. She was chagrined to hear my triumphant conclusion that she was "well", Only 18% of the Midtowners were "well", over half had mild or moderate symptoms of mental disorder, and about a quarter were "impaired" in their mental-social operations. Actually I scored a little less "well" than she -- perhaps because I attempt so much. The more complicated my days, the more conventional neurotic symptoms I detect in myself.
The rumors and coincidences in the use of Jeanne d'Arc:
1) The times
2) The conditions of belief of the 14th Century
3) The character, dress, manners, tastes, conduct of Jeanne, all explainable but still perfectly combined (the perfectly combined average is the most extraordinary, exciting, and aesthetic spectacle for humankind).
4) The lack of attack on the roads to Chinon
5) The man on horseback who insulted her, as she approached the Castle of the Dauphin at Chinon, was told""Ha! en nom Dieu, tu le renyes, et tu es si près de ta mort," and who fell into water and drowned an hour later. Etc. Many like this.
6) Many slight exaggerations of the natural that cannot be denied because exaggeration is a casing around truth. You are guilty of a lie if your critical poniard cuts ever so slightly beyond the casing.
Am 3/4 finished with the heavy labor of dragging the old piano from the basement to the first floor, tearing down the basement stairs and wall in the process, and then reconstructing the old cellar-type of entrance into an English basement staircase. I can find many reasons for doing this arduous and lengthy work, but the most exact one is that the job is so ugly that I must do it just to feel that I have achieved it!
A two-hour meeting of full professors at Dean Murphy's office yesterday to recommend someone as Department Chairman. Complete disagreement. I suggested finally a preferential ranking of everyone in the Department by everyone else. I also suggested Koenig, first, and then Al Somit, as two names to be placed before Chancellor Stoddard. Stoddard, Murphy, and the professors of the Department are making a farce of the business. S. is an egomaniac who has an imperious often bad judgment and prevents his subordinates from exercising initiative.
The avoidance of decisions and commitment is a lush manure from which mushroom scientific theories, subtle concepts, variegated perspectives and millions of protoplasmic committees.
* Anxious people have no real wants. Anxiety is a degenerative disease of the will.
The proliferation of methods of choice and choosing (including elections) increases as the ability to make choices declines.
True of individuals and societies both with respect to individuals and things. Examples can be taken from economics, where choice has recently become important as science field because people do not strongly want anything. Cf. also politics, social status, art, -- in all spheres both the pure and applied areas, mind and practices.
Have given a few hours to peddling advertising for the June issue of the ABS, which deals with Southeast Asia at length. I suppose that I might do very well as a space-salesman, but it is certainly dull work.
An easy way to save a couple of millions a year for the country and lots of wasted time -- have a master addressing system with one number to every individual followed by an address code. So Alfred de Grazia, the American Behavioral Scientist, P. O. Box 64, Princeton, NJ (a non-complicated address by the way) could be 1 - X64 - 412
me Box Princeton New Jersey
Actually this would be a makeshift until everyone who"arrived" got a P. O. number.
11.30 PM
Met with George Shapiro to become better acquainted and to plan to raise a new Committee of Artists and Scientists for Rockefeller?? Should it be attached to Rep. Party or "free"? should it start "national" or "state"? Ought it be big or small, exclusive or inclusive? We now have the money to cover a staff of four and have good space at the new National Republican Club.
"How to go "right" without being wrong". This would be a discussion of the unilinear ideological way in which 'liberal' Republicans go toward 'socialism' and 'statism' and conservative Rs go toward inertia and resistance to all change. There are numerous means of acting outside this beaten path that is like a canal donkey's day.
* * * * *
Summertime How it may be spent = Time in days
Project A = Articles of the New World Order 20
Project B = ABS planning 10
Project C = Speech on Theory of Electing & APSA Conv. 5
Project D = B - M pilot codex 5
Project E = B - M full codex 5
Project F = Rock. Intell. Comm. 10
Project G = Mental Health Intl. Commun. 10
Project H = Random & misc. activities 7
(incl. beach with family)
Project I = Europe 3 weeks 15
__
87
5-day work weeks 17 2/5
6-day work weeks 14 ½
There are 17 calendar weeks between May 23 & September 19.
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A headache this morning from excessive drinking and smoking between 6 and 12 last evening. Cocktails and dinner with Stephanie. She went home and I joined a party being given for Mohamed Sahnoune on Waverly Place. He is leaving next week for Tunis and Algeria. Talked mostly with Shanderli, the head of the Algerian national Liberation Front in the USA. It appears that we are both sociologists and passed 2 years of war within a few miles of one another in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. Our conversations re the development of Algeria were cordial, but at one point several Americans, putting on the eager, sympathetic, innocent act, had him worked up to some fairly incautious (but alas true) statements about 'helping" the Europeans to leave the country if they did not behave better before the transfer of power and I became angry. I was more irritated at the sympathizers than with him. I said to him that "bitterness is no guide to policy." He said "But there hasn't been a single European Algerian voice against the daily murders!" I agreed that this was significant. Yet, I said, the mass of Europeans, like the mass of Algerians who could not be said to have deeply involved themselves in the revolution, were sheep. They could not be held accountable. The argument, brief and sharp, was made difficult, of course, by the absurd cluckings of sympathy from the Americans at the Algerian sufferings. What can we do about this bleeding heart part of our population? It manages to blunder into every policy plan, divert every rational public debate. it is like the goony birds who hop into the propellers of jets planes trying to land or take off at Guam.
Young Professor Bob Woetzel wined and dined a group of Catholics and near-Catholics from Fordham NYU and a L. I. Seminary this evening. A charming New Orleans Classicist named Cousins sat on my right and talked of the UN Sicilian archaeology with me. Across sat Prof. Cronin of 18th Eng. Lit. specialty. He mentioned the preciosity of 18th cent. poetry by which we must mean that the poets of the period (save Bobbie Burns) spoke not to the "people" or any sizeable part of them but to a small University group who shared the classical allusions, the mannerisms of the day, and the same set of foci on the same problems. It is clear to me that the poet writes for an audience usually, wittingly or unwittingly, and sometimes, as in our day, is so bewildered by the lack of a focused audience that he communicates with nobody, not even himself. A men without a social reference is lost to himself as well. The "scientific" poet in regards to audience targeting is he who is sharply aware of his audience. He knows its contours. If we attack a poet on grounds of his unintelligibility, we must set down the premise of value that lets us define his audience as we please, not as it happens to be or as he intended. The question arises: is there a universal audience to anything worth saying? Should there be? I say Yes to both but there should also be special audiences and unconsciously selected audiences and, why not, solipsistic poetry -- there is no need for a law against these things.
Stephanie and Julia have worked strenuously with me for 2 days on the June issue of the ABS, of which S. is special editor. S. & I bucked against one another half the time and I have been exceedingly irritable with her. She cannot work under a person, but must be in the person, so she becomes tiring to work with. In the end, she is as efficient as the average highly educated person and no more so. The damnable galleys and [page missing]
