The Problem of Social History

 Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (April 17, 1974)

Lecture by Carroll Quigley

INTRODUCTION: ...his bachelors, his masters, and his PhD from Harvard University,
and he’s been teaching here ever since. He’s the author of Evolution of Civilization and of Tragedy and Hope: A
History of the World In Our Time, and also of numerous articles in Current History and other magazines. And I
suppose with that I should introduce Dr. Carroll Quigley.

0:0:34

QUIGLEY: History is concerned with the events of the past. But events don’t occur without expenditure of energy. And human beings do not expend energy unless they have some reason. The reason presumably being to satisfy some human need. Now, historians have never asked themselves what are the basic human needs, how do they lead to expenditures of energy in history, or any of the really fundamental questions which create the events which presumably historians are studying. In many fields, in many aspects of past events, other fields have analyzed or asked these questions. For example, one of the most fundamental of human needs is security. While historians don't spend much time dealing with security, military strategists and political analysts and so forth have spent a good deal of time. So what we could do as historians is go look at what they have to say. When you come to social history, however, you don’t find that situation. I would assume that if historians wanted to know what are the basic social needs of man and what energies are expended in what ways to satisfy those needs that they could go perhaps to sociologists. But if you go to sociologists, you find that they are doing very much what historians are doing except that they have removed from the picture much of the past and are concerned with what is happening today. But essentially, their approach is a descriptive approach, as to what is in any society, and they usually restrict themselves to their own society. Now we get a good deal of additional information, including the kind that I’m referring to (basic human needs and the energies to satisfy them and so forth) from another branch of what we might call sociology: comparative sociology. The word we use for it is anthropology. Anthropologists are concerned with comparative approaches to human ways of life and human events. And until relatively recently, anthropology which is, in any case, a very recent field of human endeavor, not much more than 150 years old, although it is quite true that Herodotus in 450 BC could be called the first anthropologist. I would say that perhaps thousands of years went by before the second one came along. As a result, he’s rarely regarded as an anthropologist. But anthropologists concern themselves very largely until quite recently, that is for the last 40 or 50 years, with primitive peoples and not with civilized or high civilizations or advanced societies. So we don’t get very much help from any other discipline when we approach as historians the events of the past from the social point of view.

0:04:09

For many years, I taught a course here [at Georgetown] for freshmen, and while they had never any problem when I spoke of the military aspect of a society (or the political, the economic, or the religious, or intellectual, or various others) in understanding what it was in general that I was talking about. But whenever I spoke of the social aspect, they didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. And accordingly, I discovered (usually after they had done very badly on a question in an examination, which proves my lack of perception as a teacher) that they hadn’t understood the question because they didn't have any idea of what I meant by social. And accordingly, I used to try to simplify it by giving them what we might call a descriptive definition of the social aspect of history. Now before I go into that, I want to give you the aspects that I generally demanded that they understand. There are many many aspects of the human past and of any single event in the human past. But I generally said to them, there are six that I want you to always consider: those would be the military, and the political, and the economic, and the social -- in recent years I have inserted above this another one: emotional, religious, intellectual.

0:05:51

And these seven aspects of events are the result of a variety of human needs. The reason I put them in this way is because they are at a higher level it seems to me of need. A level which makes them more man-like and less, shall we say, animal-like. On this level, at the bottom, we would have security. And if you read the original documents, which founded America, we were looking for international security (which would be the military), domestic tranquility (which would be the political) -- so we have the military and the political. We have looked increasingly for prosperity and affluence (which is, of course, the economic). Then comes this one that we're puzzling about: the social; the emotional, the religious, and the intellectual. If all of these different kinds of activities occur in history, there obviously must be human needs -- and I will not make a list of the human needs over here except that you can see it would be security. Now for domestic tranquility, the chief problem would be settling disputes within the group, just as the military's chief problem is defending the group as a whole against outside intruders. So here you have group cooperation, on the military level, to satisfy a need, which we could call if you nwish "security." And then, settling disputes, and so forth. All of these various needs. Now I think the needs are more or less obvious to you; certainly the economic needs of food and shelter, and so forth, of various kinds are perfectly clear. I think you would also say the military is perfectly clear: weapons, and a defense force, and so forth. And perhaps, I'm not sure you would know what the intellectual need of man would be. I would simply say it is explanation -- and I usually put down what the need would be -- explanation. That is to say, men are not satisfied unless they have some explanation as to what is happening to them, the reasons for it, why does this thing happen, why does the sun rise in the East, why do the crops appear at this time of year in the spring and die in the fall. Why, why, why. It wouldn't be human if you didn't ask why. Although, I must confess the majority of humans today apparently never ask why. But certainly thousands of years ago, there was a more prevalent asking of the question why.

0:08:53

Needs: Now the religious need. Again I think this is one of the most difficult, but it is an assumption, and a need to feel that there is some power or powers in the universe, stronger than we are, who can either help us orwho are responsible for the things that happen to us, which seem so out of character, unjust, unseemly, or whatever it happens to be. There is a religious need. I myself would have great difficulty, I think, giving a succinct definition of the religious need. But the proof that it is there is in this: In any society where religion has been abolished -- not just as a body of ritual and activities, but as a body of accepted belief -- the people have substituted for it something else. And today, where we have a very unreligious world, and particularly perhaps in the European world, and especially in the English speaking portion of the European world -- because I consider us part of Europe: Western Civilization--that in these areas, you have secular religions. We are certainly today not a religious people. But what you find today is an immense allegiance to ideological slogans and symbols, and ideas, and so forth, which are clearly secular religions. "Secular" means, of course, in the world of time and space, where God we would think since about 500-600 BC would be outside of the secular/temporal world and up in a world of eternity and unchanging verities: you can call it "eternity" if you wish.

0:10:58

I do think this shows that there are religious needs, but what is the social need? The social need is in some ways the most obvious. And yet today we not only do not spend much effort on it, but we have absolutely no respect for it. Today, people are rarely consciously influenced in decisions by social needs -- and I emphasize all of those words. Because today, more than anywhere in recent history, it seems to me, men are very definitely motivated in decisions -- in unconscious decisions -- by unconscious motivations, which rest in social frustrations and social inadequacies. Now that idea I hope isn't too complicated for you. I'll give you what I mean by that: Men need other people. It's perfectly obvious. If a child is born and does not have associations with other people, he never becomes anything. In fact, he won't survive. And for a couple of years, he must have the care of other people to survive. But he needs much more than physical care; we've now discovered this. Much more important than adequate nourishment in the first two years or three years of life is -- I don't like to use this word because it's a word that embarrasses people -- love. If an infant does not have love in the first two years, does not have attention, and amazingly, is not spoken to -- for example, we have many cases where even in our own society infants growing up are not spoken to, they may be yelled at -- even when they are adequately taken care of with regard to being kept clean and bathed and fed, such as in infant asylums and institutions which have been established for orphans or foundlings, you will find that they grow up emotionally and mentally crippled. And it is absolutely irredeemable. (In other words, you cannot get them at age twelve and make it up.) It's a little bit like the fixations which animals get such as geese. You know a goose always latches on the first moving object that it sees after it has been out of the egg a certain number of minutes. It's supposed to biologically -- the first moving thing that it sees should be its own mother. So the result is little goslings should follow their own mothers everywhere. But under the conditions in which we hatch eggs, there may not be a goose around anywhere, so the first moving object they see may be the dog or the cat or a man or a woman, and accordingly, they will follow them. Everywhere. I remember trying to get rid of two ducks one time [audience laughter], when we drove about twenty-five miles out past Potomac, to a farm where they had a beautiful pond covered with ducks. And we put our two ducks down and thought they’d go right in the water -- they hadn’t been swimming in any water; we had no pond right here in Foxhall Village -- and that they’d be happy, we could say goodbye and so forth. No, no, the minute we put them down they turned around sat in front of us. So we started to walk to the car and they came after us and came to the car. Well, I won’t get into the long tale -- although the story does have a final, crash ending [audience laughter] -- which is this: we find we have to leave them there, on the edge of the pond, and run as fast as we could, me, and my -- I guess it was just my older son who was at that time perhaps eight. We get in the car and we dash off on a long drive, and as we drove out the front gates, say half-a-mile away, we looked back and there were these two white things coming down the road. So I drove rapidly back to Washington and the next morning I was awakened at about six-thirty in the morning by "quack, quack, quack, quack" outside the window. Now don’t jump to unscientific conclusions that they followed us home because they were two different ducks. I don’t where they came from [unintelligible 00:15:23] water again [audience laughter].

0:15:27

Now human beings are the similar [sic]: they attach themselves to things. If a child in the first two years is not dealt with affectionately, and this involves not just talked to, but he must be held against the body -- or she --the baby must be held against the body of another human being. Preferably against the skin of another human being. And if they are not, they would be crippled emotionally in various ways afterwards. You see this in the kibbutz. I don’t know if you know anything about the Israeli kibbutz. They’re very admirable things and they bring up the most extraordinary young people, but they find it very difficult to relate personally to other human beings. The most amazing thing of all is, I believe, there is no case known of a child brought up a kibbutz married a girl brought up in the same kibbutz. In other words, a kind of incest thing occurs there even though they may not leave it until they are well-formed in their teens.

0:16:40

 These kind of emotional things we don’t have to go into, but people need other people. They have to have. The worst thing you can do to a human being is to cut him off totally from other people: solitary confinement, or coventry, or whatever you want to call it. And even if they have been adequately prepared -- treated -- in the first few years of life -- for instance this is what happened to the Head Start program. The Head Start program was an effort to take infants -- if you want to call them that -- at approximately age four and take them into a schooling system and we have now found pretty conclusively that age four is too late.They have to be got earlier. But to get them earlier, you know, it makes big problems. And the point which I raise, which is a very cynical point, is why should you take children in the ghetto -- at age of one-week or whatever it is -- and treat them, let’s say “properly” --if we do know the proper way to treat human beings. And then have them grow up as sane, responsive human beings with an ability to relate to other human beings. And throw them into a world like ours which is no place for any sane well-balanced person to try and live. I don’t know whether your silence indicates that you agree or disagree. But we have clearly created -- or have created -- a world in which the insane are going to be much more at home than the sane.

0:18:22

I would like to add one other thing here. If we are historians, it is not sufficient to list human needs because human needs are genetic: they are in the genetic endowment of what you inherited through your genetic heritage and they do not influence society. Society is influenced by desires. And desires are not the same thing as human needs. They are the socialization of a need into a desire. For example, people need food, but they desire the kind of food which they were brought up to regard as food and will refuse to eat those things which they were brought up to regard as garbage or inedible. It’s happened in most of history that people who have starved to death have starved to death because the desire, which they regard as food, is not available, while in the context where they are, there is perfectly adequate food, but it’s not what they were trained to regard as food. For example, there’s no excuse for anyone at sea -- a castaway -- dying of either hunger or thirst no matter how long they are floating on the ocean. The only thing you have to worry about floating on the ocean really is the sun, and if you can get a canvas over you, where there is steady sun, you can find from the ocean plenty to eat: you just tie a handkerchief on a string and trail it and you will find -- although you may not want this as a steady diet -- that you will be collecting a great mass -- and it would take only a few hours to collect it -- a great mass of what essentially is shrimp cocktail. Now you can eat it without sauce [audience laughter] and it is extremely nourishing.

There are other things -- I will not go into this -- but a couple of weeks ago someone asked me -- a student -- what is the most important thing for him to learn. And he was quite shocked when I said “survival.” And I insist that that is the most important thing. So that you can be thrown out in the world, as you may be in your lifetime, to survive off of what is available. But in any case, social then is concerned with -- now, when I asked the students -- what do I mean —

0:20:56

If I asked “social,” “social history” let’s say of a country. In order to simplify it, I gave them two things they should always watch for: what I call “social aggregates” and “social classes.” By “social aggregates” I mean those units in which relationships between people are arranged in the particular society. The history of social aggregates is the history of the changes in those units. Throughout history, those units or social aggregates have been either local units, such as parishes, villages, or perhaps cities later on and so forth, towns, or they have been kinship units, such as clans, tribes, families or whatever it would be through relationships. These are the two that in a very brief survey of the social history of any culture, I will attempt to deal with. I want to point out certain things here which are interesting. If you look at one of them, that is the social aggregates, what you discover is that kinship groups break down and local groups, geographical groups, get larger. So in an early period where the society is totally rural -- and mostly cultures would start in a period where they are largely or totally rural -- such as in the 17th century, the United States was almost totally rural: it was in units, which we would call “villages” and on the whole, kinship groups were not that significant. Where on the other hand, you look at other societies or you go back into the earlier history of Europe before America was settled, you’ll find that kinship groups were much more significant. In some cultures, you find that both are important. For example, in China, villages are important and clans are important. That’s why they have, for example, ancestor worship, which is the clan. In India, kinships groups -- if that's what the castes and sub-castes are -- in other words, groups of relationships, are very important. In the Islamic world, kinship groups are supreme, so that for example, villages are torn to shreds in the Near East, in the Islamic world, by the fighting -- even a small village -- between families. A person in the Islamic world will generally trust no-one who isn't of his immediate family. This is why the traditional preferred marriage in the Islamic world is a marriage which is condemned in the Western Civilization as incestuous: that is, first-cousin marriage. In the Islamic world, you are supposed to marry -- and of course, it's like everything else, it's broken up in recentgenerations, but it's still to some extent present -- you're supposed to marry your parallel first cousin: that is your father's brother's daughter. And it generally, in the traditional law of Islam, she cannot marry anyone else or consider anyone else or an offer from anyone else or anyone else's family until her cousin has said no. This is sexism of the worst possible sort. I used to abrade a friend of mine who was pushing forty. I only met him occasionally, but when I did I said, "Have you released your cousin yet?" He said, "No, no, I may want to marry her." And I said, "How old is she now." And he said, "Oh, she's thirty-something." And I will not tell you what my next statement was because it was relatively profane. I said, "You are an S.O.B. because you have at least five different women a week, and you are saying to her that she has to sit there in Syria, and die, because you will not say, "you're free to go marry somebody else," at a time when she could build up a family. Now in our Western Civilization, as you know, this is the forbidden degrees of kindred. So the kind of units that we are concerned with are these units of kinship.

0:25:48

To follow the history of any society, you will find that you go from rural to an increasingly urbansituation; that you go from villages -- or possibly large clans or even tribes -- toward a breaking down of kinship groups. So it goes from clan to a lineage, to an extended family, to a nuclear family, to a biological family -- to simply a husband and wife -- and then finally to atomized individualism. Today we have practically reached atomized individualism, not totally because the law is still there. I asked a colleague of mine if he owned a certain house, right here, and he said, "No, my wife does." Now, that is the ultimate you see. There are jurisdictions still, one is -- well, West Virginia I know is one, where I bought a piece of property and my wife had to come with me because it isn't possible for a husband to own something without his wife having a claim in on it.

0:27:03

So the atomization of individuals has not gone the whole way. You can tell when it goes the whole way by looking at three things: First, how readily can marriage be broken -- the appearance and state of divorce and we are rapidly reaching a future, I think, in which there will not really be any marriage -- when young people will live together and have a ball. There seems to me actually a good deal of this at the moment and maybe ultimately. That would be an atomized individual. The other is the rights of children. When children have property rights from the moment they are born, which their parents have nothing to do with and cannot touch, then this is an atomization, you see. When a child can leave the home, at any time -- now in Islam, today, still girls cannot, generally, leave the parental home. And it was always understood that if a girl did anything like this, her father and her brother had an obligation to kill her -- in traditional Islamic law. Today, I know many people who leave the home when they go off as freshmen in college and never come back. When their vacations come, they go off in different places. This is this atomization of life which is a process.

0:28:38

When you have such atomization, relationships between individuals depend entirely upon what we would regard as voluntary decisions: I will be your friend or you will be my mistress or whatever it is, it's a voluntary agreement of personal relationships. The personal relationships are very brittle, they may break overnight, they have short duration, and there's a tremendous amount of emotional voltage on them. This is one of the reasons that marriages are disrupting so rapidly in our society today: it's because other personal relationships have dwindled to very little. The result is that your parents' generation, where they had a romantic theory of love and married for love-- the one man in the world that was made for them, and so forth and so forth -- this was a tremendously high voltage relationship. All of their emotional needs had to be satisfied by this relationship with a single person. It was never possible to do that, and the reason it wasn't is because these needs are so diverse. The opposite goes with territorial aggregates. Here, they were villages, then you have the beginnings of commerce, the rise of towns, and then eventually you have cities, and so forth and so forth. Now, we have to make a sharp distinction between what I would call an "Asiatic society" and what I would call "Western society" although I do not mean just Western Civilization. The difference is this: in an Asiatic society, they make no effort to make the political unit into a social unit. That is, a unit which satisfies the needs of human beings for other people -- the gregarious need which is ultimately an emotional need -- they make no effort to do that. Instead, the government is essentially a military taxing system, and it is above social groups, which we call "communities" This is the reason that these Asiatic societies can go on, in many cases for very, very long periods when the governing system -- the political system -- has collapsed. They also, in addition to the state -- which in Asia might well be an empire, and they make no effort to make it a social unit -- they also make no effort to make the civilization as a whole a social unit. Instead, they have lesser social units: either villages, neighborhoods, parishes, families, lineages, or whatever it is -- the social units -- and these things have tremendous persistence and tremendous satisfaction of the emotional needs and the social needs of other people.

0:31:57

For us to approach Asia -- let's say as a study area -- with the assumptions that we have in the West, namely, that the political unit should be a social unit, and should be a community in which all men are brothers, or beyond that, that the state should be expanded to include the whole civilization in which all men would be brothers. We are told, for example, by certain writers, that this was the dream of Alexander the Great: to establish a brotherhood of mankind by creating a world empire. If so -- and I think there's certain evidence that it is so -- this is definitely not an Asiatic idea; this is a Western idea. The civilizations which have insisted that the political unit should be coterminous with the civilization, and above all, that both of these -- whether they are coterminous or not -- should be a community in which people are treated as members of the same community and satisfied of their various needs and so forth, have been -- I would say Classical Antiquity was the first; I don't know any earlier. I think it could be well-argued that Byzantine Civilization and perhaps even Russian Civilization were similar, certainly, this is what Western Civilization has been. The reason that Western Civilization is so very aggressive -- there are many reasons, but one of them -- is this insistence that the political unit should be a community. This breaks down because it's unsatisfactory for people. As a result, you get terrific emotional frustrations.

0:33:55

Let me go into something else. Much of what happens on this social level is the result of events on the economic level. Those events on the economic level are the reorganization of the society by division of labor, by the application of more productive forms of expending energy, and by exchange of goods between specialist producers, and so forth, by heavy investment -- as we would call it -- of capital, which is a method of using manpower and other forms of energy. As a result, there has been a drive toward what we would call "affluence." This drive toward affluence eventually becomes unsatisfactory. Always. I won't go into the reasons why. What I would say is people's desires for affluence cannot keep up with the processes by which the production of affluence is achieved in any society. And the organizational structures which you establish for achieving affluence -- and I guess I have to put this in -- become institutionalized: become ends in themselves. So that people are making their position in a specialized economic activity the sole goal of their aspirations and are insatiable in the affluence they hope to get out of it, such as controlling petroleum. And the people in control of petroleum today have only one aim in life which is to prevent the American people from recognizing that there are enormous other sources of energy, many of which are practically free. If you feel that there's a lack of energy in the world in which we live, you are greatly mistaken, and I advise you to look at last week's weather reports. The power in any one tornado -- and I will not go that far -- but certainly, wind-power can be harnessed and replace all petroleum needs, but you're never going to find it mentioned. Brookings Institution this month -- or, in a couple of weeks -- is producing a book on energy needs and resources and so forth. From the outline they've sent me -- the brochure about it -- it doesn't mention anything except fossil fuels and nuclear. This, of course, is what the people who control the thing want. Now because of these restrictions by the people that control the organizational processes and structures through which we satisfy needs, needs can never be satisfied to the degree to which desires escalate. And desires escalate because of the disruption of social context and the growing dissatisfactions of man's gregarious needs and his emotional needs.

0:37:17

Because -- and you've heard the statement many times -- that no one is as lonely as the person living by himself in a large city. I spent the summer of 1940 living in Cambridge [Massachusetts], and it was absolutely desperately, incredibly, lonely. I never want to live through it again. I think in many cases, a day went by without me speaking to another human being, which is no way to live. Yet, here I was in a big city, where I had been living for nine years, at various times, and so forth.

0:37:50

 You disrupt social relationships when you shift, let us say, from a rural parish to a village, to a town, to a city. And by disrupting those you disrupt the satisfaction of gregarious needs, which come out of established personal relationships with other people, relationships upon which you can rely not relationships of the moment. Not picking up someone in the street and finding there's a certain click, and you register that you can communicate and so forth -- that isn't enough. It has to be something that you can feel a certain permanency to it for it to be satisfying of your gregarious needs and of your emotional needs. Now as emotional needs and gregarious needs become increasingly frustrated, more and more energy is put into finding what, I would call "substitutes." That is, you seek more satisfaction of your economic needs for goods. So emotionally frustrated and socially frustrated, and stultified movements, seem to substitute for these inadequacies, loneliness, or whatever you want to call them -- or other things -- getting more and more and more. And you get a relentless, neurotic, and ultimately insane drive to acquire goods. And books have called it the "acquisitive instinct." It isn't an instinct at all but it is acquisitive. So that you have people who have incomes of a million dollars a week, or in some cases -- a few cases -- a million dollars a day because there are some people who have incomes that are close to 400 million a year. These people are nevertheless working sixteen, eighteen hours a day trying to make more money. They have no time at all to enjoy any goods that they acquired before. Now that's our life. If a lot of people are doing that, it becomes increasingly difficult to do it because they're competing with each other. And accordingly, a society at a certain point begins to take those energies, which are seeking more and more goods, and divert some of them down into the political level.

0:40:29

 Before that, you will find that the economic expansion of any society is accompanied by what we call the "commercialization of all human relationships." That is, they are commercial relationships. I have seen families where the father will say to the son, "Will you cut the front lawn and I'll give you a dollar," or whatever it happens to be. Or, "Will you shovel the snow on the driveway." These things become commercialized, not put upon the basis of "I would like to have it done, and if you would do it, it would be a great help to me," and so forth. But this commercialization of all relationships does not become total until a society is just going to destruction.

0:41:26 

For example, in my lifetime, let's say in the past forty years in which I've been very close to universities, higher education has become almost totally commercialized. I think family life has become largely commercialized, and so forth. What we might call the "commercialization of human relationships," but already fifty or a hundred years ago, the politicalization of life had started. Now by the time politicalization is spreading -- in other words, what this means is that if you want the knowledge you have to have power, and your political relationships will determine what your incomes are going to be, and you can increase your incomes through contacts. Now, I give examples of this in my class and the students are utterly stunned: If you knew the Department of Agriculture report on the wheat crop for the coming year, 24 hours before it was published, you're going to become a millionaire. And don't think this doesn't happen to some extent. Now, this is the kind of contacts, you see, that makes it possible. And you will generally find that today, immensely wealthy people are only immensely wealthy -- that is, if they acquired  it in their lifetime -- because of political relationships of various kinds. So we have the politicalization of life. But eventually, a lot of people enter upon that, so you get the militarization of life, even later. Now this politicalization -- and when you get the militarization of life, you get the kind of thing that we're told is "imperialism" and war becomes increasingly common and so forth because are using the unit, in which they are trying in our society to form as a community to form into an aggressive military unit, to increase control of the outside world and increase control of the factors of production, to put it in economic terms.

0:43:47

Now I'm particularly interested when this goes on with what happens up here [on his chalkboard]. What happens up here is you have an emotional frustration, and people no longer get emotional satisfactions. I'll give you a theory which you may not accept. I was thinking about it for many, many years: What is it that gives people emotional satisfaction? I could put it in a single word: functioning. The most satisfying emotional thing there is is to do something that you are able to do. But it also has to be something that you can justify as being worth doing, and that, of course, gets you up to the religious, or the ideological, or the intellectual level: to rationalize and justify. Let me make it a little less abstract; "functioning" isn't enough. People get emotional satisfaction out of existential relationships with other people or with nature. Now with other people I mean, again, a personal face-to-face relationship, in which it's a relationship between two unique personalities, such as never existed before, and never will exist again, and indeed, that experience that you're enjoying of the other person will never occur again. Every emotional experience is unique. And therefore you cannot have a relationship with a person as a category or a person in a category. You cannot have a relationship with a man, let us say because you like army officers and he's an army officer -- something like this -- or that you like wealthy men and he's a wealthy man. Or because you like a person of a certain religion and he's of that religion or something. As soon as you can characterize the person, it ceases to bean existential relationship: it becomes a categorical, intellectual, relationship, which is a totally different thing.

0:46:12

Similarly, with nature: It does no good to go out into nature if you are characterizing it, you are not enjoying it. A lot of us will do that. It helps in many ways to make it conscious, what you are experiencing. If, as you go along, you say,"That is a Baltimore oriole that I hear." Or when I walked through the woods this morning -- I shouldn't mention this because some of you will go ahead and pick on them, and you should never pick anything in the woods -- but I saw a great many Jack-in-the-pulpits. This is the best year I've seen in twenty to twenty-five of Jack-in-the-pulpits, just quarter-of-a-mile west of here.

0:46:54

Now, that's categorizing, but to have a relationship with such a thing, and I hope you will not think I'm simply being poetical when I say this, but it is possible to have an emotional relationship with a Jack-in-the-pulpit. I mean it's an absolutely incredibly beautiful thing and it is unique. You watch it change from this bright green to the brownish purple it's going to be in, let's say, a week or so. It's all part of that experience. Now human beings are emotionally satisfied only if they have these kinds of existential relationships with other human beings, and with nature. And like most social relationships, and I believe probably most emotional relationships, they have to be relationships that you believe have a certain persistence in them. It isn't enough to just have it in the moment. I have had emotional relationships that lasted -- um, I'm thinking of one in that summer of 1940 -- [pause] [audience laughter] Now I can go back to it and it was a tremendous thing. To me, it was like looking at a Jack-in-the-pulpit or maybe something like a Baltimore oriole -- the first one of the year. I will never forget it, but I have no idea anything about her. Now since you are all toying with ideas, I will tell you I was in a hospital [audience laughter] and someone came in and offered to rub my back with alcohol -- and I will go no further except to say it was a most satisfying experience [audience laughter]. That is an emotional experience.

0:48:49

Today, as the result of the urbanization, and industrialization, and politicalization, and militarization of our society, it is almost impossible to get in touch with another person on this kind of a unique, personal, existential, relationship. Or to get in touch with nature. We are constantly shut-off from other people and from nature by categories, words, artifacts of all kinds, buildings, clothing -- streaking didn't help -- and so forth. This is the reason today we have a society of people who are enormously frustrated with a need for emotional experiences. And here's what they do: they either make some symbol, or some slogan, or some verbiage. And [the] intellectual [desire], which is supposed to give explanation, today does not give explanation at all: it gives us ideology. We have words that we get excited over, and slogans, and verbiage, and symbols -- even when people don't have the slightest idea what the symbols are. For instance, I'll say one that will shock you. The symbol for, what do we call it, "women's lib," is a fist in a uterus. Now, this is beyond any doubt if you study the history of symbols. This is what women's lib is all about, but I know people who -- women's lib, they get so excited about it that they go practically insane. And this is true of many, many things. I walked down here, 35th Street, with a girl student, who was a pillar of piety in many ways [audience laughter]. In those days they had decals on the back of the car with American Flag, and every-time she passed one she'd say, "fascist" [angrily]. An American Flag. Now, this is an emotional reaction. Let me give you -- this morning's paper stunned me -- I'll give you a horrible one. William Shockley, who of course is an idiot, is a technician but he's called a scientist because America doesn't know the difference between a technician and a scientist. There are very few scientists, the world is run with technicians. For the benefit of the few who do not know, William Shockley is the inventor of the transistor. And he's going around the country, on what appear to be one-night-stands everywhere, preaching a doctrine which is that the blacks are intellectually inferior for genetic reasons. This is nonsense for half-a-dozen reasons that I won't get into. For instance, the very word "black" is a meaningless word. He knows nothing about genetics. The word "intelligence" is meaningless -- I will say flat: there is no such thing as intelligence. There are many talents, and the greatest authority on intelligence in American psychology says there are thirty-six of them. I think that's overdoing it. I would say there are at least five or six separate characteristics, for which a human being can be tested, which we generally when they are used are designated as intelligence. Intelligence tests are completely meaningless. Now I can say that, because when I was about seventh-grade, or eleven or twelve -- this is when they first invented them. Stanford and Binet were both still alive and kicking. It was administered to all of the students in the school where I was, and I had been put in the seventh grade into a non-French seventh. We had two levels: Upper level were French-seventh, lower level, the incompetents [audience laughter]. Now, this isn't the reason, but you see, as a child, I was known as a non-reader. But by 15, I was in Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not for having read a book a day for several years. So you see you can remedy these things if you simply get motivated enough. I was the highest one in that school in the intelligence test. Well, the teacher got so excited about it -- I was disgusted [audience laughter]. They came running in: "Oh, where is he!" And then all the--- [audience laughter]. In the first place, I didn't in those days believe in intelligence, or intelligence tests, or that they would indicate anything, but Shockey for seventeen minutes last night, was shouted down at an educational institution in New Haven [audience laughter], which makes me very sad. Because if an idiot wants to go around the country preaching nonsense, by all means, everyone should listen to him and recognize that it is nonsense and that he is an idiot. Instead, if you shout him down, it's perfectly possible for anyone to say, "This group of people refuse to listen to the truths that he has to preach." And that is unfortunate. Let him show his wares-- or lack of them.

0:55:17

The point I'm interested in is why does something like that happen. It happens because of the emotional frustrations. People are going to get all excited about words and so forth. This morning's paper is filled with it. I could have brought in this morning's paper and given you quite a lecture upon what's the matter with the United States. Here we see a hold-up and the debate is whether Miss Hearst is or is not a willing and active participant in the hold-up, which to me is a minor matter. I am interested in -- I think her name is Mrs. Hill, I may be wrong [i.e.,actually, Nancy Ling Perry] -- who ten years ago was a violent supporter of Barry Goldwater, then became apparently some kind of a lesbian, and has love poetry written by her girlfriend, then married a negro whom she lived with for several years, left him two years ago and became a participant and advocate of violence against everybody. And when she got a job at a fruit juice stand, selling -- well [to someone in the audience] you're doing this [gesture] to mean that she's insane, but this is categorizing you see. The world is not made up of sane and insane people. These categories are meaningless. When she was working at a fruit juice stand and apparently the customers were not demanding grape juice that fast, she cut her hand, collected the blood and wrote on the stand, "Death to pigs.” Here is a person -- and you're all thinking, "Oh, she's a minority." There are probably millions like her in the world. If you simply look through the paper this morning, there are dozens and dozens of them reported. Two boys about eighteen stopped at Frederick, Maryland, go into the police laughing and joking. The police said, "What do you want?" They said, "We murdered my mother and my sister last night." Well, they won't believe it. And they say, "Will you go back? Where are they?" Up near Gettysburg or somewhere, and so forth, and you'll see it in the paper if you haven't already. It was true: a six-year-old sister, a forty-year-old mother strangled. One of the most horrible ways to die, really, by an eighteen-year-old. Why do things like this happen? Now, I will not continue to narrate what's in the morning paper, but what's in morning paper isn't a small fraction of what happened in the United States yesterday. The reason for this is this tremendous emotional frustration, which comes from two basic things: the fact that we cannot establish -- or it's very difficult today to establish -- emotional experiences on an existential basis because of the barriers. And the barriers between are both organizational, artifactual, and intellectual. Because intellect is no longer explanations, it is slogans and verbiage, and so forth, to get people excited. When students, or any other group, make demands; they are not making demands because this is something they want. They are making demands because making demands will lead to an emotional experience by leading toward a confrontation.

0:59:12

 Out of this comes, as you can see, a really horrible situation. What happens? What happens is -- as past history shows -- groups of people begin to leave the society: cop-outs. "Opt-outs" I;d say just because I like to use Latin. "Opto" [I choose] out. And they go into what you would call "communes." Now because they don't know what's wrong -- they do not know what a community is -- they go into a commune. A commune is self-defeating because you cannot have a community unless you have differences. All satisfying emotional, and social relationships are with people who are different, and you cannot make them with people who are the same. In a commune -- and this is very noticeable among students, and Americans increasingly, our students of the past now moving up and it occurs amongst everyone around forty now. They associate only among people of the same age -- "peer groups," we call it. This is not the way, a hundred years ago, America was. A hundred years ago, all associations were with people older and younger. Furthermore, all social activities were activities for all ages or for families. The Fourth of July picnic, and celebration, and fireworks displays, which is one of the big moments of the year -- or any other moments that you want to mention: Christmas, or New Year's Eve -- always was, back in the old days, made up of people of all sexes, all ages, and frequently of many different economic statuses. Here, I would like to throw in something very quickly -- I'm going to stop in a moment because I don't want to talk too long. 

01:01:17

Social classes -- we are increasingly getting histories of social classes. Anyone who writes a history of social class and doesn't know what he means by social class or what social class is, his work should be destroyed.But it isn't. It's published, and read, and repeated. Social class must be defined in some way where you can analyze, prove, or disprove. It certainly is not based upon economic income or any of these other things. It is based upon something else, and I will put it very succinctly and at the core of it: social class is based upon cognitive assumptions. Cognitive assumptions are the assumptions that any individual, or society, or a group have, regarding how human experience is categorized and the valuations put upon the categories. These are, almost universally, unconscious assumptions, which you absorbed when you were being socialized as a child, and then when you went  to school to be socialized. It's an amazing thing that in bringing up children in families, and in sending children to school and educating them, no one had ever looked at this, or had anything to do really with cognitive assumptions-- it's been an accidental thing. When negroes say, for example, that it's unfair to ask them to take our achievement tests or intelligence tests and so forth, they are perfectly right. Because our achievement tests and our competitive grading systems are all based upon cognitive assumptions, to the point that I would say this: the outstanding students, the ones that invariably perform brilliantly on examinations and get A's, are not nearly as good as the B+'s behind them. Because the B+ is a person who can see there are other ways of looking at it, and he can bring up alternative views. [That] those alternative views are rejected by everyone, including the professor or the grader, does not mean that they are necessarily wrong. They have to be analyzed in terms of the context of all the assumptions you are grading the papers in such a way that you give an A. This becomes very difficult to a person, like myself, who is aware of these things, but I generally compensate for it by writing more strong, and more powerful, letters of recommendation for B+'s or B's than for A's. In fact, I've written some for people who got C's and D's, who went on and achieved brilliantly.

01:04:18

 Now I'll stop at this point simply because the subject is endless -- Oh, one other thing. Social classes. We deal with social classes and believe people should relate only to their own social class: workers to workers, petit bourgeoise to petit-bourgeoise, gentry or aristocracy with so forth and so forth. This, not only is untrue, but it is not what the historical experience of the world shows.

[END OF LECTURE]

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