"Marx is one of the people after whom the world is never quite the same again. Nevertheless, the human misery which has been caused, indirectly, by Marxism is so enormous and the tyranny which it has fostered is so monstrous, the corruption of not only art and literature, architecture and even science which Marxist society suffered is so painful. What is even worse, the corruption of simple human friendship and all the ordinary decencies of life which is so typical of communism is so terrifying, that one wonders how a movement which originated from a genuine and deep moral protest and from a deeply moral man could possibly have led to so much misery.
"The principal villan would seem to be the dialectical philosophy. This places a premium on conflicts even where they might be avoided. It provides a significant excuse for the expression of aggression and hatred, and it diverts attention from the solutions of problems to the winning of victories. It is to the credit of Marx that he was one of the first to recognize that mankind in this period is passing through a very profound transition and that indeed a new world is coming into being which, whether we like it ot not, is going to be very different from the old. In a very real sense, history is coming to an end, in the sense of the record of wars and empires, revolutions and class struggles, all arising out of competition for the pitiful fragment of surplus value which is all that preindustrial techniques premitted. It is possible that the human race will not make this transition and that it will either destroy itself entirely or fall back into barbarism. It cannot stay where it itl it must wither go on into a very new kind of society or it will fall back. But which somebody wins and somebody loses, but a process of slow cumulative change. The attempt to interpret this process in dialectical terms is not only unrealistic, it would easily set it back." 4
"One basic value common to both East and West today might be discribed as disalienation--that is, the development of a society from which no one will feel or be excluded or alien and in which all will have equal rights and equal privileges, in one at least of the many sense of the word equality... The ethical principle which is at the base of mmuch socialist ideology and which gives it much of its power might be called familism: the idea that all members of society and ultimately all members of the human race are part of a single family, and therfore each has responsibilty for all. However, this is neither more nor less than the idea of a brotherhood of man long preached and little practiced by all the great world religions. It is a vital part of whatever passes for ideology in the West as well as in the East.
"...I am inclined to the paradox that a society in which the non-economic elements in life have a strong familistic or socialist character, the institutions of capitalism and the market economic will work very well because they are constantly guided and checked by the 'socialist' ethic. I would cite the United States as a good case in point. On the other hand in societies where the sense of community is weak and where the sense of the responsibility of each for all is poorly developed, the institutions of capitalism can be quite corrupting. China before the revolution may well be an example. If we are the world and devlope a pragmatic, indeed a social scientific approach to the problem.
"Therefore, if there is any ideology peculiarly appropriate to the
achievement of the transition it is neither capitalism nor socialism but
the scientific ideology itself applied to soceity. An ideology for the
great transition must then be a strategy rather than an ideology...."
"...No society, no matter how primitive, wheher human or animal, can exist without knowledge of some kind. The bird must know how to make a nest, the ants must know how to behave like ants. In the case of nonhuman society most of the knowledge is acquired genetically--that is, it is built into the structure of the animal by the growth processes organized by the genes. In the case of human society only a very small percentage of knowledge which is necessary to run a society, even primitive society, is acquired genetically. Almost all the human knowledge which carries on the culture has to be learned from infancy. There must therefore beresources of some kind devoted to the increase of knowledge. THis we migjt almost call the knowledge industry, although in the primitive society this is not specialized and represents rather a certain apportionment of the time of the parents, grandparents, other relatives, and wise men of the tribe which is spend with the children and young people in teaching them the knowledge which is necessary for the culture.... In all societies, however, a certain proportion of social activity of the society must be devoted to producing, rearing, and teaching children in order to replace the skill and the knowledge which is continually lost through old age and death. From the point of view of society as a whole, knowledge is a highly depreciable commodity. Every time a man dies the knowledge which is enshrined in his organism is capital lost to the society. Even in the case of a single individual there is a constant process of forgetting, and old knowledge has to be relearned.
"If now the knowledge industry, or the total resources devoted to increasing knowledge in a society, is only just sufficient for replacing the knowledge which is lost through aging and death, the society will be stationary. Each generation as it grows up will replace its parents exactly in the role structure of the society." 6