Too Many Helpers

As a first secretary at Britain's Washington embassy during World War II, broad, black-haired Isaiah Berlin developed two bad habits: he was always late to work (he likes to sleep until 10:30), and always the last to appear at a dinner party. No one minded. His flashing dinner talk never failed to charm Washington hostesses and capital pundits. And his brilliant reports on U.S. thinking and doing made him Winston Churchill's most penetrating official observer of wartime America.

Last week, Philosopher Berlin was still observing. He had returned to Oxford to take up his old job lecturing on philosophy at New College, after teaching for a year at Harvard. In the British weekly Time and Tide he told what he had learned about the postwar U.S. university.

In some ways, he thought, U.S. students had the jump on their British counterparts. They are "more intellectually curious, more responsive to any influence, more deeply and immediately charmed by everything new . . . They seemed (and this could at times be very exhausting) almost incapable of boredom, or of more than a very surface scepticism."

Higgledy-Piggledy. But of course, added Berlin, "many of these excellent young people could not . . . either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities. That is to say, their thoughts came higgledy-piggledy out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant . . . Somewhere in their early education there was a failure to order, to connect and to discriminate . . ."

Since they had not learned how to read intelligently, "they tended to look to their professors to tell them not merely what books to read but sometimes what chapters and what pages; on being told, the more serious among them would throw themselves upon the recommended pabulum and would try to absorb it in a very frenzied fashion. They read rapidly, desperately and far too much. And because they tended to believe that all facts (and only facts) were important, and, what is more, equally important, the result was often a fearful intellectual congestion from which many of them will probably suffer for the rest of their lives."

No Epics. But the congestion and confusion, Berlin decided, had also a more sinister cause. U.S. universities, he found, were plagued by an enervating sense of guilt--a "state of mind of academic persons . . . whom war service or some other sharp new experience has made painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society. Like the youthful Kropotkin ... a student or professor in this condition wonders whether it can be right for him to continue to absorb himself in the study of, let us say, the early Greek epic at Harvard, while the poor of south Boston go hungry and unshod."

The result, said Berlin, is that scholars and intellectuals find they can no longer believe in their scholarly or intellectual pursuits for their own sake. "Once a community automatically begins to consider disinterested curiosity as being something idle, time-wasting, self-indulgent and, therefore, immoral, it is in a very bad way . . . Few great works of art, or great discoveries of science, have ever been made by men with one eye on the social consequences of their activity . . ."

Cynical & Sinister. "When I tried to suggest to my more socially conscious American students that intellectual curiosity was not necessarily a form of sin or even frivolity and that a possible valid reason for pursuing this or that branch of knowledge was merely that they were interested in it ... I could see that I was thought ... to be expounding what is vaguely thought of as the 'European' point of view--at best something exotic and overrefined, at worst cynical and slightly sinister . . .

"This naive, sincere and touching morality, according to which . . . the primary duty of everyone is to help others . . . with no indication of what it is that everyone is to help others to be or do . . ." has led to a view of the world as "an enormous hospital of which all men are inmates, with the obligation of acting as nurses and physicians to one another." In such a world, disinterested study has no place. Nor, in fact, have such bothersome questions as the nature of the universe and man's place in it. Such questions, never immediately answerable, have proved too painful, give rise to anxieties and maladjustments in a society bent on "frictionless contentment." Asked Berlin: "In what other period of human existence has so much effort been devoted, not to the painfully difficult task of looking for light, but to the protection . . . of individuals from the intellectual and moral burden of facing problems that may be too deep or complex? . . ."

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