NARROW VISIONS Russell Kirk II

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chief affliction of the social sciences nowadays, especially in the United States, is narrowness of view. Three great disciplines are poorly understood by the typical social scientist: religion, history, and humane learning. Thus the social imagination is impoverished. Below I remark the consequences to society of slighting these branches of knowledge. Among the people generally classified as social scientists there exist eminent exceptions to my strictures: R.A. Nisbet, Peter Berger, Raymond Aron, Bertrand de Jouvenal, Michael Oakeshott, and more. But I write here of the generality.

Origins of Social Science The purblindness of many social scientists is related to the origins of the social science discipline itself. Bentham and Comte fathered scientific social studies--both of them erratic men, good at dissipating other people's illusions but possessed by illusions of their own. Both were contemptuous of religious doctrines, thought themselves superior to the men of past times, and did not much relish poetry (in the larger sense of that word). Their prejudices have tended to persist among social scientists--and their passion for social alteration, too. Had the dominant figures in the emerging discipline of social science, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, been humorous and "clubbable" men with less exalted notions of personal infallibility, more liberally schooled in religion, history, and humane letters--but then, in Eliot's lines, "What might have been is an abstraction/ Remaining a perpetual possibility/Only in a world of speculation." Be that as it may, constricted positivistic concepts of social science still dominate the field. Narrowly schooled in techne, his moral imagination underdeveloped, his private rationality elevated at the expense of our patrimony of culture, the representative social scientist almost leaves out of his reckoning several principal sources of knowledge about human nature and social order which are far older and still more powerful than are behavioristic and statistical studies.

Religion: Source of Order First, the typical social scientist either keeps religion in a compartment quite separate from social thought, or (more commonly) dismisses religious faith as an irrational cultural lag--possibly interesting as aberration from logical and systematic social understanding, but not to be taken seriously as 52

the basis for a tolerable society. In the chaos of fradulent or crazy cults afflicting us nowadays, it is easy and amusing to expose the vagaries of certain types of "religious experience": many a doctoral dissertation may be compounded thus. Nevertheless, every society arises out of religious convictions and bonds---out ofreligio, the tie that binds. The order of the soul sustains and shapes the order of the commonwealth. If religious teachings are decayed, then pseudoreligions, or ideologies, are devised to fill the vacuum after a fashion. We are reminded by such influential historians as Christophere Dawson, Arnold Toynbee, and Eric Voegelin that culture grows up from the cult. The relative success of the American democracy, as Tocqueville noted, has been the product chiefly of Christian mores. The King James Version and The Pilgrim's Progress did more to mold American society than did any treatise by a social philosopher. Some years ago, replying to a criticism of tendencies in social science which I had written at the request of the New York Times Magazine, Robert K. Merton declared, among other things, that sociological studies had shown conclusively how religious belief has no influence upon criminality. This sweeping, presumptuous allegation illustrates my remark that most social scientists are strangers in the great complex realm of religion. What religion, when, where? This assertion was especially odd in coming from Merton, who--unlike many of his colleagues--does possess considerable knowledge of historical and literary subjects. For any such study to have been convincing, it would have been necessary to compare societies in which religious belief is vigorous with societies from which religious belief has trickled away altogether; but societies of the latter sort do not exist even today, and never have existed. That religion does not convert the average sensual man into a saint, in any age, is readily demonstrated; but it is as simple to show, as George Bernard Shaw put it, that without religion the average goodnatured man is a coward. True, Sweden has little crime, and churchgoing has declined there; while Sicily has much crime, and churchgoing thrives there. But economic, political, and historical factors must be taken into account in such a naive comparison, and churchgoing ought not to be equated with religious apprehension. Religious convictions, or "immanentized" corruptions of religious belief, still operate powerfully in society. Foreign policies may be conceived in (or at least veiled in) what Sir Herbert Butterfield calls the error of "righteousness"; or

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they may be dictated by the quasi-religion of a fanatic ideology. At the voting booth, the right-to-life activists undo pollsters' analyses of public opinion concerning abortion on demand; without the religious injunction to charity, the modem w o r d would be even more the w o r d of Cain than it is already. Every society rests upon dogmata, even if those dogmas have been obscured. A supercilious ignoring of the religious elements in a society must betray the social scientist to inefficacy--perhaps to worse. " I f you will not have G o d - and he is a jealous G o d - - " T.S. Eliot observed, "you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin." Bentham's moral calculus and Comte' s priesthood of science will not suffice to keep the knife from our throats.

Historical Learning: Restraint on Presumption Second, much social science in our hour is vitiated by disregard of the long record of mankind. It is true enough, as Burke said, that there come occasions when the file affords no precedent; but those occasions are the exceptions. I am not advancing a simplistic notion that "history repeats itself": it does, frequently, but always with variations. I do commend to social scientists Santayana's aphorism that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. The social scientist who mistakes his own era for the whole of the human condition is confined within a provinciality of time. Robert Merton was so confined when he made the grandiose "scientific" generalization mentioned above; he might have profited from reading Lecky's History of European Morals. If deficient in historical knowledge, the social scientist badly lacks perspective, and may mistake ephemeral or induced tendencies for ineluctable "progress." If some social scientists had known much of anything about the history of political revolutions, and how they devour their children, they might have been less enthusiastic about the upheavals of the past quarter of a century. Presumption, in the sense of impertinent boldness, is a natural vice among social scientists. Grand social designs, coffeehouse constitutions, seem so convincing upon paper; but the old Adam is forever intervening. Only long backward views can give us some glimpse of the probable consequences of social measures. In public concerns, as in private, the past is our only reliable source of knowledge--revelation aside. The "present" is a fleeting moment, and the future is unpredictable, really. Thus for the social scientist, even more than for msot of us, the fund of empirical knowledge called history is immensely valuable, freeing one from foolish notions. I wonder at the lack of historical perspective betrayed by a good many social scientists. Even very recent history, the history of their own times, is left out of consideration by some. I have met professorial advocates of "socialized" medicine in the United States who have not troubled themselves, as social scientists, to examine the course of the British national health system over the past three decades--even though the similarities of British and American society make it possible to draw parallels and offer predictions with some sureness. March / April 1978

One reason why the framers of the American republic wrought prudently was that most of them had read Plutarch, and some of them had read Thucydides. How many twentieth century social scientists have done that? If history is chiefly a record of failures, still it is possible to avoid repeating some of the more obvious blunders of the species. It is an assumption of philosophic historians that human nature is a constant. Many social scientists do not so assume. Yet t h e " nature" of a creature amounts to its distinguishing, enduring qualities; by definition, then, a nature is constant. If no ascertainable human nature existed, it would be impossible to construct a science of society, let alone to plan for social improvement. Without norms, indeed, pushpin is as good as poetry, and Cambodian society in 1978 as commendable as Swiss society in 1978. Without some thorough knowledge of the societies of the past, how is it possible to judge of prudent social measures in this society of ours? The petty bank and capital of private rationality does not suffice us for that. A merely "pragmatic" social science, devoid of historical knowledge, would be more disastrous than a medical science which should disdain all medical knowledge not acquired during the past few years. The social scientist who ventures to prescribe for a living community on the basis of assumptions allegedly "value free," "pragmatic," and "rational" actually is ensnared by his own prejudices, private experiences, and imperfect schooling: subconsciously at least, he mistakes these for universals. For him to apprehend the splendor and the misery of the human condition, its limitations and its possibilities, his perceptions must extend beyond his immediate environment and his brief personal experience of reality: he must know history. Not enough social scientists do.

Humane Learning: Imaginative Power Third, the social scientist, if he is to be more than a technician, must participate to some degree in the poet's vision. Technology undirected by the higher imagination is perilous to everybody. The proliferation of specialized (though frequently amorphous) social science courses at colleges and universities--often courses of a character that would be better imparted by in-service training--has worked to deprive the social scientist of humane learning; yet it is precisely for "the education of governors," of those who form the policies of a society, that humane studies are intended. For good or ill, poets move the world, showing us the way to order in the person and order in the republic--although often they are without honor in their own generation. The most penetrating of social philosophers, Plato, also was a great poet. (It is some evidence of the blinkered vision of many social scientists today that even certain of the more celebrated among them try to pin the ideological label "communist" or "fascist" to Plato--as if the armed vision could be suppressed by an irrelevant epithet.) Vergil's concepts of labor, pietas, and fatum sustained Romanitas for four centuries, and their influence is not yet extinct. Paul Roche, the English translator and poet, suggests that to every cabinet minister there ought to be attached a poet, 53

and the minister compelled to hearken to him: thus baneful decisions might be averted. What poet, Roche inquires, would have approved more than a decade ago the grandiose schemes of the British Ministry of Transport for covering Britain with superhighways on the American pattern--with incalculable damage to agriculture, the ecology, established patterns of living, historic communities, and existing means of public transportation? Yet the thing was done--until the money ran out in recent years--regardless of these consequences, poets not being listened to. Society suffered for lack of their vision. When a president of the United States asked me what one book he should read, I told him, "Eliot's Notes towards the Definition o f Culture." Men high in office would learn more from reading Eliot than from reading Karl Mannheim. Yet how many social scientists know well Eliot and Yeats and Frost, or any other major poets of our time? Few of them even guess that the poets have aught to teach the statist. Social structures erected by social engineers merely are as ugly as buildings erected by construction engineers merely--and both of these forms of ugliness oppress us today. The social architect of poetic vision, like the material architect of poetic vision, must inform the engineers. "For us to love our country," Burke said, "our country ought to be lovely." Humane imagination denied, the fabric of society and the fabric of its buildings must be ugly and unloved. The crime-racked and decaying high-rise "lowcost housing" complexes of our cities the late Pruitt-Igoe misconception in Saint Louis, for instance, or similar urban deformities in Glasgow--are consequences of urban planning without humane vision and urban construction without regard for intangibles. This is as true--this consequence of a paucity of humane learning---in other social concerns. Once I was present when some social scientists were discussing complacently ways to "bring democracy" to Chile, or Brazil, or Argentina. I inquired whether they had read Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo. None of them had. So schemes like the forgotten Alliance for Progress are cooked up hastily, publicized immensely, given large public appropriations--and are quietly dropped after they have failed. Reading Nostromo at least might have suggested to them that the difficulties of Latin American states are not to be resolved by abrupt injections of foreign capital. This is not to say that poets and novelists offer us social cures for all the ills to which flesh is heir; but they teach us much, and a society which has neglected the humane vision must be a blundering and bored society. The attentive study of humane letters might also diminish the amount of jargon uttered and set down by social scientists. This applies as much to the theologians of our time as it does to the social scientists.

Liberal Education Am I saying that social scientists ought to be liberally educated? Indeed I am--understanding by a "liberal education" that development of intellect and imagination which John Henry Newman best describes. Mere "training" and 54

vague humanitarian sentiments cannot sustain a society increasingly objectless, monotonous, depersonalized, materialistic, bored--and violent. We ought to cultivate imperial intellects among social scientists. The social scientist now has at his disposal large resources and powers. In considerable part these are being squandered. Improperly employed, such resources and powers----even given the best of intentions--actually can accelerate social decay, killing with kindness. They might bring into being the life-in-death "Logicalist" order which Robert Graves pictures in his parable Seven Days in N e w Crete. They might open the way for Orwell's "streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets." Yet it need not be so. The social scientist needs urgently to transcend the dogmas of utilitarian and positivism, nineteenth century notions now obsolete. He cannot rid himself of that burden of yesteryear' s fallacies without some mastery of religious understanding, of historical perspective, of the springs of humane imagination. As today's physical sciences venture once more into mystery, so today's social sciences ought to grow adventurous enough to explore realms of knowledge and vision whose existence they have tried to deny.

Improvement? There will not be any speedy improvement. Whenever I have written such suggestions, I have found myself beset by angry rejoinders, both from senior scholars in the social sciences and from newfledged Ph.D.'s. Clearly many of them think I imperil their livelihood. These employ the argumentum ad hominem, the mark of men cut to the quick and uneasy in conscience. With many, the burden of their refrain is, "There's nothing wrong with us that more grants won't cure!" I have sinned against the Holy Ghost of Comte, and am a fit subject for the Holy Sociological Inquisition. Yet, gentlemen and scholars, something is wrong with the social sciences which fatter grants cannot mend. Within your discipline, the moral imagination has atrophied. If you can restore that, you may redeem the time.E3 READINGS SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR: De Grazia, Sebastian. The Political Community: A Study of Anomie.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Kirk, Russell. Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1969. Nisbet, Robert A. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1962. Tinder, Glenn. The Crisis of Political Imagination. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964. Russell Kirk is the author of eighteen books and of several hundred articles, short stories, and review essays. He is editor of the quarterly journal The University Bookrnanand writes a monthly column on education for the National Review. He writes and lectures on political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, foreign affairs, ethical questions, and social themes. SOCIETY