mirable insistence upon tracing consequences and upon verificationrnprocesses, but in the assumption that this method isrnsufficient in itself. James, in his gentlemanly contempt for religion,rnwas willing to allow believers to enjoy the “moral holidays”rnthat derive from religious faith, and he was surprised byrnthe angry rejection that his condescension inspired. But, by thernGo visit a school, and observe the music,rnthe dress, the manners, the language, thernviolence. This is multiculturalism in action,rnwhere skinheads represent the last bastion ofrnEurope and the cross is worn as a symbol ofrnwhite racism. Teachers blame it on the home,rnbut I know the children I sent off to school, andrnit is hard to recognize them after a year of formalrneducation—private or public. Assimilationrnworks, but we are becoming them.rnterms of James’s own analysis, a purely pragmatic account ofrntruth leads to frightful consequences. His colleague JohnrnDewey became a political propagandist for democratic socialismrnand, in his hatred for Stalin, could not or would not acknowledgernthe obvious truth, that Trotsky was just as criminal.rnDewey, acting on the principle that truth is what works, exoneratedrnTrotsky as an obvious political gambit aimed at discreditingrnStalin and strengthening what we would now call thernneoconservative wing of international socialism.rnJames and Dewey were able to understand truth only as anrnexperimental process that leads to results in this world. Theirrnway of truth is typical of most scientists and intellectuals whornsee their job as a matter of analysis and criticism. Theirs is therntruth that an individual can find and verify for himself. LikernPlato, they are inclined to look down their noses at mere orthodoxy.rnBut what a man can find out in the brief period of hisrnactive existence is very little. Most of what we know of goodrnand evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, kindness andrncruelty, we learn from the tales and proverbs handed down tornus and from the books we use to supplement or supplant traditionalrnwisdom. Aristotle said that he only wanted studentsrnwith sound characters, because analysis was only good for testingrnand validating what you already knew. If a man does notrnhave a just character, he will never understand justice, no matterrnhow hard he studies. In fact, he will only discover ingeniousrnways of defending injustice, vice, and perversity.rnThe brightest people usually end up saying something likernwhat their peasant grandmothers knew all along, and much ofrnthe worst mischief in the wodd has been caused by the halfeducatedrnsmart aleck who wanted to distinguish himself fromrnthe common folk. These are intellectuals, whose type can bernrecognized in the sophists of the 5th century B.C., the Christianrngnostics, and the philosophes of the 18th century, and itrnis the perennial task of the wise to combat their ingenious vanities.rnModern intellectuals, convinced that they are on the cuttingrnedge of progress, are incapable of any originality beyond thernstatement “I don’t see any reason why…”—as in I don’t sec anyrnreason why a man should have to go to church on Sunday, limitrnhimself to one wife, kill harmless animals, study dead languages,rnor wear a necktie to work. As critics, intellectuals canrnbe useful to the world, and the smart-aleck phase is only a stagernin the development of many human beings, but to remain anrnintellectual is like being 15 years old for the rest of your life.rnPhilosophic sages and the greatest scientists begin by askingrnmany of the same kind of questions put by intellectuals,rnbut they are not content with the obvious answers. The intellectualrnreads a bit of potted anthropology—Margaret Mead, forrnexample—and concludes that the customs of our own societyrnhave no foundation. A real student of human culture draws thernopposite conclusion: if the Samoans or the Hopi have strangernfolkways that are vital to their cultures and to their survival asrnhuman beings, then why is it not equally important for Anglo-rnAmericans to preserve our own exotic customs?rnA large part of our own folk culture is bound up with thernWest’s conception of truth as an honest and reasoned accountrnof the objective wodd. It is not that civilized Oriental nationsrnand even primitive peoples never conceived of objective reality,rnnever reasoned their way to correct conclusions. Primitivernman is a very practical being, a professional naturalist who usuallyrnknows as much about important species as the trained biologistsrnwho come to catalogue his world. But, for him, objectivernreality is shot through with mysterious subjectivities.rnDreams, shadows, impressions left on a bed, even fingernailrnclippings are fraught with peril, because an enemy might usernthem for magical purposes.rnOne of the criticisms made against Lucien Levy-Bruhl andrnhis book La mentalite primitive was that he drew so many examplesrnfrom the advanced civilizations of the East. In a way,rnhowever, Levy-Bruhl was right. The philosophers of Indiarnand China revel in paradox and exult in the confusion of subjectrnand object. The world is illusion; the passive and acceptingrnbaby is the human ideal; right and wrong are mere conventions,rnwhich the enlightened man transcends.rnI anticipate the objection that modern science has gone beyondrnall this objectivity. Einstein and Hcisenberg have shownrnus the relativity of the universe and the impossibility of separatingrnthe observer from the observed. Modern science, on thisrnaccount, is returning to the wisdom of the East or, at least, tornthe pre-Socratics.rnDid Einstein’s theories really precipitate a moral and culturalrnrevolution toward relativism, as so many (Paul Johnson most recently)rnhave argued, or were his views adopted by a culture thatrnhad already gone relativist. G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica,rnwhich Lytton Strachey and his friends used to justify their immoralism,rnwas published in 1903, at the very time Einstein wasrnevolving his theory and long before his work was recognized.rnBesides, as Stephen Clark has argued, Moore’s work was distortedrnby his admirers. It was the culture itself, not Moore orrnEinstein, that wanted moral and cultural relativism. Why, isrnanother matter.rnThe same holds true for the earlier revolution in physics thatrnsupposedly sparked the cultural revolution that is still called thernEnlightenment. In the textbook version of intellectual history.rnSir Isaac Newton’s demonstration of an ordedy and rationalrnuniverse inspired Voltaire and the other philosophes with a desirernto find equivalent “laws” for the human world. The trou-rn14/CHRONICLESrnrnrn