NOTED AMERICAN STATES HIS VIEWS
Both Christianity and Communism had failed to solve modern man's problems, said Professor Clyde Kluckhohn at Armidale.
Professor Kluchhohn, who is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Russian Research Centre at Harvard University, is visiting Australia to give the Dyason lectures for 1952.
He spoke on "Ways of Life in Conflict" to a meeting arranged at the Teachers' College by the Armidale branch of the Institute of International Affairs.
Professor Kluckhohn said that the Communist and Jewish-Christian conceptions of human nature had been incomplete and inaccurate. They had under- and over-estimated their materials and so their theories had not been workable. Each had failed in its highest aspirations.
Professor Kluckhohn said he thought, however, there were good reasons for believing that the ideas which could build a new and better way of life for all humanity would come primarily from the West.
"I do not think for a minute that the resources of Western thought are exhausted,'' he said. "They are merely, at present, too split and diversified.
"But our diversity is our strength as well as our weakness of the moment. Out of its many strands can come a more true and more powerful conception of that human nature upon which all ways of life must be erected."
Communism or other forms of totalitarianism would unquestionably possess this earth unless we could quickly make our thinking right, eliminating some of the more glaring inconsistencies between scientific knowledge and popular thought, Professor Kluckhohn added. There was a good chance a new ideological order could be built before it was too late.
The beliefs that bound the West should not, however, be allowed to remain so implicit and unformulated and so backward-looking. We would lose the cold war and a possible hot war if we continued to fight with the technology of 1952, but with the ideas of 1852.
The fact that Communist ideology was itself terribly dated and scientifically unacceptable did not make it less threatening to the Democracies as a secular religion unless and until we could oppose to it a formulation that was equally impressive, equally coherent internally, but more soundly founded upon the facts of external and human nature.
Professor Kluckhohn said he believed the dream of an eventual world order was not just a phantasy.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "if one looks below the surface of current controversies , one can detect many agreements.
"I have examined carefully certain utterances by Senator Robert Taft and Comrade Joseph Stalin in which each stated what he wanted for his people. There was amazing similarity, point by point. The disagreements were over the means by which these ends were to be attained.
"Don't misunderstand me— I know that millions have perished in human history in quarrels over means. Nevertheless it remains important that men and women over the surface of this earth want pretty much the same, simple things — and their leaders know it.
"Looking at it in anthropological perspective, the broad similarities are far more distinctive and striking than the differences.
"Even in theory, the convergences between Marxism and Western social science are far greater than either side is willing to admit publicly these days."
Dissatisfaction In Russia.
Professor Kluckhohn spoke of the possibility of an uprising in Russia. Dissatisfaction created by the gap between expectation and reality was general throughout Soviet society, he said.
The Russian people were dissatisfied with their low standard of living, with the power of the police, with the official intolerance of religion and with the lack of popular participation in Government.
The instabilities of the govemmental system were, however, the only ones that could set off a major crisis under anything like the present conditions.
The dissatisfactions could play an important part once there was an open struggle for power at the top. Then each conflicting group would bid for popular support to defeat its rivals.
Only under these circumstances would the disaffection, which was undoubtedly already widespread, really count.
"When, however, history offers to the Russian citizen the possibility of an alternative course which better suits his aspirations, it is altogether likely that he will seize it," Professor Kluckhohn declared.
"Millions did even under the unpromising circumstances of German invasion."
The Soviet way of life; Professor Kluckhohn added, was inherently unstable because it denied in practice the deepest human aspirations, because it was based on a false conception of human nature, because it throttled free scientific inquiry, and because the unity it purported to offer had disintegrated intellectually and had always been distorted in application.
Communist philosophy, being the culmination of a long stream of thought leading from Plato to Hegel and other continental thinkers, placed a higher value on equality than on liberty.
It allowed restraints on personal liberty, provided these restraints were applicable to all equally. The central concept was what was good for society, not a concept of individual fulfilment or individual morality.
The Anglo-American line on the other hand placed liberty higher than equality. It had traditionally restrained the legislature and the institutions rather than the individual. It had surrounded the individual with safeguards such as appeared, for example, in the Bill of Rights. These conceptions traced from the Stoic philosophers and from the notion proclaimed by 17th and 18th century English-speaking theologians that man's conscience required him to accept personal responsibility for his acts as a citizen.
Bogus Promises
"From this situation arises the challenge of the Communist way of life to ours," said Professor Kluckhohn. "All the peoples of the world outside the Soviet orbit are to a greater or lesser degree confused as to what is a right way of thinking and a desirable way of living.
"Despite the fact that the Heroic Age of Soviet Communism is over in its homeland, the slogans still have some pull among those who have not experienced the doubtful benefits of living under a police state regime.
"The promises, however bogus, of orderly life and unity of thought have an unhealthy appeal for the disadvantaged, the frightened, the bewildered the worn out with struggle and disillusionment.
"And not solely for these. Many Communists in France Italy, India, Africa and other parts of the world are genuine idealists in a way which we of the Anglo-Saxon tradition were once the real revolutionary idealists of the world.
"The idealism of Communists outside Russia is misplaced and naive; naive because of what has actually gone on in all countries where Communism has been put into practice. Misplaced because Marxism as a system of thought has disintegrated.
"Nevertheless the humanitarian aspirations of the old Marxism still exert a powerful appeal. And intellectual idealists continue to believe that they have in the worldly religion of Communism an answer to the meaningless chaos and confusion that they have seen. They are stirred by the comprehensiveness and explicitness of the scheme.
"Hence men and women are both pushed towards Communism by fright and bewilderment and pulled to it by motives that can only be described honestly as idealistic."
"Something Wrong Somewhere."
In the discussion that followed Professor Kluckhohn's lecture, Dean M. K. Jones said he felt it was man, not Christianity, that had failed. Man had misinterpreted Christianity.
Professor Kluckhohn replied: "I grant you that true Christianity has not been applied yet. You say it is man, not Christianity, that has failed. Yes, that may be so, but it seems that if after 2000 years Christianity has been applied only by a very, very few select souls, then there must be a huge gap between the human material and the lofty ethic. There is something: wrong somewhere.
"It seems perfectly clear that Christianity is not going to save us in our present crisis. If it does, it will do so only after the worst holocaust the world has ever seen. As an anthropologist, I can't get around that one.
"It is my unhappy conclusion that the present Christian Churches are not going to bring order to the diverse cultures of the world.
''The Churches not only want to teach heathens the gospel, but they want to destroy the heathen's way of life root and branch. I cannot see that this will work.
"I am forced by historical fact to the conclusion that, despite the nobility of the four gospels, no peoples known to history have been as murderous and destructive as Christian peoples have been."
Chairman of the meeting was Mr. E. W. Dunlop, president of the Armidale branch of the Institute for International Affairs. A vote of thanks to Dr. Kluckhohn was moved by Dr. R. B. Austin and Mr. E. J. Tapp.
Uralla Times (NSW ), 11 September 1952 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article175993992
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