SPAN: June 1962

FILE COpy

Bombay's Mary Leela Rao discusses customs inspection procedures GeOl'goBrokaw, I~D with . Customs Inspector in San Francisco.

See page forty-six.

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e~\educa(io e rehch of that the nu young women p through the portals of institutions of ]ligher learning should increase from year to year. In the United S.tates there were 1,975 such institutions in 1960-61, with a total enrolment of 3,610,000 students. Approximately 500,000 degrees will be conferred by U.S. colleges and universities this year in commencement ceremonies similar to those at Columbia University shown on the opposite page.

The basic philosophy of equality of educational opportunity has to be reconciled with the need for maintaining adequately high standards and also for making college curricula conform to the requirements of a complex, highly i,ndu alized society.

American unive . lie eS now offer a s ~a~~ • ~ Courses have of training stud eral orr professional ca t also take cognizance of the wi ening concepts of citizenship and the new international responsibilities wh'ich the United States has undertaken. As part of· the answer to this increasing desire to understand the affairs of other nations, some forty leading U.S. colleges and universities now .offer courses in Asia'n studies.

There has also been considerable expansion recently in the teaching of modern foreign languages for which there were over half-a-million enrolments durin'g 1960-61. Besides the study of European languages, c.ourses in various Oriental languages are attracting large numbers of students. is the An interesting development creation of hundreds of language laboratories where ots use electronic equipmen eaktllg from pre-record foreign 1anguages.

American universities Continue to participate actively ifl the international exchange ,of students a nd teachers. In 1960-61 there were 53,100 foreign students in American institutions, including more than 5,000 from India .• ,00

4 THE HUMAN QUALITY

by Edwa I'd Post

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6 MAN'S NEW LANDSCAPE

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10 THE REVOLUTION IN WESTERN THOUGHT

by Huston

16 THINKING

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25 THE INTELLECTUAL

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28 THE CONSEQUENCES OF DISARMAMENT

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32 THE LONG LONELINESS

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FOREIGN LANGUAGE

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STUDIES

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46

THE VERSATILE MISS RAO

by Melvin

Wax

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the challenges of our new epoch to the intellectual man

The Human Quality

equipped with the potential of massive physical energies, seems to demand an altered perspective of man's bondage to certain long accepted defects as unalterable elements of his own nature. It seems to pose the necessity for a reformed view of man's accepted incapacity, individually and collectively, to master those traits of his own species which are the source of social evils that he intellectually deplores and morally rejects as unacceptable.

The intellectual man, whether he be theologian, philosopher, psychologist, artist, statesman or scientist, is the keeper of social change. He is the catalyst which stimulates the alteration of human attitudes and values. Motivated by his peculiar need to explore, to know and to enlarge the scope of human effectiveness, he prompts the direction of reformation. With a new sense of urgency he now faces that most provocative and critical challenge: to turn his creative energies

towards mastery of the tragic anachronisms of warfare, of the corruption of public trusts, of inequities and indignities rooted in the accident of birth, of political tyrannies, of the waste in ignorance and illiteracy, of the constant fear for survival in the struggle with poverty.

Political ideologies alone cannot achieve this imperative reformation in the self-assessment and the social effectiveness of collective man, although it can only be inspired and flourish in a climate of free inquiry, free thought, free expression, and free acknowledgement of the innate moral and spiritual aspects of the human quality which distinguishes our species from all others. A revolution is required in the interactions of individuals, communities and nations which will revive and release those effective energies latent in the human condition that in long-past epochs of change prompted man to stand

upright, inspired him towards social behaviour and enabled him to perceive his relation to the divine.

"Nothing is so remarkable," Prime Minister Nehru has remarked, "as the progressive conquest or understanding of the physical world by the mind of man today, and this process is continuing at a terrific pace. Man need no longer be a victim of external circumstances, at any rate to a very large extent. While there has been this conquest of external conditions, there is at the same time the strange spectacle of a lack of moral fibre and of self-control in man as a whole.

Conquering the physical world, he fails to conquer himself."

That conquest, too, must come in answer to a general awareness of the necessity for it and a rising urge to achieve it, which are growing in all sectors of the human family where value and faith are invested in man's moral and spiritual essence.â&#x20AC;˘

Span

June 1962 5

Radiograph of a snake, above, paired with that of a faulty heating coil, right.

Man's New

Landscape

(Continued)

Photomicrograph

of

sections

a sea worm reveals functionol

of shapes.

Black and White

Procaine penicillin looks like an exotic flower.

Photographs by Gyorgy Kepes

The new landscape has wonders without end. We have created electronic brains and nervous systems which are now as much a part of the workaday world as the mechanical muscles developed by the nineteenth century. Looking into the far reaches of space we are discovering exciting clues to the great puzzle that is our universe. We are peering into the very heart of life, seeing how it renews itself following nature's subtle order. And as scientists study the intricately complex structures of the very small, the gap between animate and inanimate matter narrows, resolved into a new unity comprising both as merely varying degrees of complexity. We are learning to discern similar forms and patterns, to trace similar processes at all stages from the small to the immense.

Commonplace things-a drop of water, a rose, a snowflake-turn into excitingly new shapes under the sharper eyes technology has put at our command. In some cases, what the scientist shows us today was not even there for man to see a few short decades ago, no matter how powerful the tools of observation-for science's laboratories have created an array of new substances through manipulation of molecular structures.

This fantastic landscape would have puzzled our forefathers, and still is strange to us. Yet it holds great promise. Ifwe but learn to see more clearly, if we sharpen our awareness and heighten our sensibility, it can help us enrich immeasurably our own lives. The choice is ours. We can try to shut it out of our experience, bound by a longing for the comfortable certainties of times past. Or we can look at it with confidence and develop a new vision to explore and more fully grasp its unfamiliar contours. Then the new landscape will be man's own .â&#x20AC;˘

Patterns

of

dynamic motion appear

in the spiral nebula, left, and a whirlpool, above, seen from the air.

The Revolution

by Huston Smith QUIETLY, irrevocably, something enormous has happened to Western man. His outlook on life and the world has changed so radically that in the perspective of history the twentieth century is likely to rank-with the fourth century, which witnessed the triumph of Christianity, and the seventeenth, which signalled the dawn of modern science-as one of the very few that have instigated genuinely new epochs in human thought. In this change, which is still in process, we of the current generation are playing a crucial but as yet not widely recognized part.

The dominant assumptions of an age colour the thoughts, beliefs, expectations and imaginings of the men and women who live within it. Being always with us, these assumptions usually pass unnoticed-like the pair of glasses which, because they are so often on the wearer's nose, simply stop being observed. But this doesn't mean they have no effect. Ultimately the assumptions which underlie our outlooks on life refract the world in ways that condition our art and our institutions: the kinds of homes we live in, our sense of right and wrong, our criteria of success, what we conceive our duty to be, what we think it means to be a man, how we worship our God or whether, indeed, we have a God to worship.

Thus far the odyssey of Western man has carried him through three great configurations of such basic assumptions. The first constituted the Graeco-Roman, or Classical, outlook, which flourished up to the fourth century A.D. With the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, this Graeco-Roman outlook was replaced by the Christian world view which proceeded to dominate Europe until the seventeenth century. The rise of modern science inaugurated a third important way of looking at things, a way that has come to be capsuled in the phrase "the modern mind."

It now appears that this modern outlook, too, has run its course and is being replaced by what some men have begun to speak of as the Post-Modern Mind. What foHows is an attempt to describe this most recent sea change in Western thought. I shall begin by bringing the Christian and modern outlooks into focus.

From the fourth-century triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Western mind was above all else theistic.

"God, God, God; nothing but God"-in the twentieth century one can assume such an exclamation to have come, as it did, from a theologian. In the Middle Ages it could have come from anyone. Virtually without question all life and nature were assumed to be under the surveillance of a personal God whose intentions towards man were perfect and whose power to implement these intentions was unlimited.

In such a world, life was transparently meaningful.

But although men understood the purpose of their lives, it does not follow that they understood, or even presumed

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Huston Smith is the first professor of philosophy to be appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since the early history of that primarily scientific seat of learning. "I accepted the appointment," he explains, "because it offers an unparalleled opportunity to tackle, head on, the problem of closing the gap in understanding which has developed between the scientific and humanistic components of our culture."

A graduate of Central College, Missouri, who received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, Dr. Smith has studied at first hand the cultures of nineteen countries. Out of his experience came a book, The Religions of Man, which has been hailed as "the first adequate textbook in the field because it treats religion as human."

to be capable of understanding, the dynamics of the natural world. The Bible never expands the doctrine of creation into a cosmogony for the excellent reason that it asserts the universe to be at every point the direct product of a will whose ways are not man's ways. God says, "Let there be"-and there is. That is all. Serene in a blaze of lasting light, God comprehends nature's ways, but man sees only its surface.

Christian man lived in the world as a child lives in his father's house, accepting its construction and economics unprobed. "Can anyone understand the thunderings of God's pavilion?" Elihu asks Job. "Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, how the clouds are balanced or the lightning shines? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth, or on what its bases were sunk when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" To such rhetorical questions the answer seemed obvious. The leviathan of nature was not to be drawn from the great sea of mystery by the fishhook of ¡man's paltry mind. -

Western the development and a new view

Thought of the

post-modern

of real ity

Not until the high Middle Ages was a Christian cosmology attempted, and then through Greek rather than Biblical inspiration, following the rediscovery of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics. Meanwhile nature's obscurity posed no major problem; for as the cosmos was in good hands, it could be counted on to furnish a reliable context in which man might work out his salvation. The way to this salvation lay not through ordering nature to man's purposes but through aligning man's purposes to God's.

We can summarize the chief assumptions underlying the Christian outlook by saying they held that reality focuses in a person, that the mechanics of the physical world exceed our comprehension, and that the way to our salvation lies not in conquering nature but in following the commandments which God has revealed to us.

It was the second of these three assumptionsthat the dynamics of nature exceed man's comprehension -which the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to question, thereby heralding the transition from the Christian to the modern outlook. The Renaissance interest in the early Greeks revived the Hellenic interest in nature.

For the first time in nearly 2,000 years Western man began to look intently at his environment instead of beyond it. Leonardo da Vinci is symbolic. His anatomical studies and draWings in general disclose a direction of interest that has turned eye into camera, in his case an extraordinary camera that "could stop the hawk in flight and fix the rearing horse." Once again man was attending to nature's details as a potential messenger of meaning.

The rage to know God's handiwork was rivalling the rage to know God Himself.

The consequence, as we know, was modern science.

Under scrutiny, nature's blur was found to be more apparent than final. With patience the structure of the universecould be brought into marvellous focus. Newton's exclamation caught the excitement perfectly: "0 God, I think thy thoughts after thee!" Although nature's marvels were infinitely greater than had been supposed, man's mind was equal to them. The universe was a coherent, law-abiding system. It was intelligible!

It was not long before this discovery began to reap practical rewards. Drudgery could be relieved, health improved, goods multiplied and leisure extended. As these benefits are considerable, working with intelligible nature began to overshadow obedience to God's will as a means to human fulfilment. God was not entirely eclipsed-that would have entailed a break with the past more violent than history usually allows. Rather, God was eased towards thought's periphery. Not atheism but deism, the notion that God created the world but left it to run according to its own inbuilt laws, was the modern mind's distinctive religious stance. God stood behind nature as its creator, but it was through nature that His ways and will were to be known.

"The new physIcs appears to point to a radical disjunction between the way things behave and every possible way in which we might try to visualize them."

Illustrated

by ZEHRA

'eJJ

with Original

Paintings

for SPAN REHMATULLA and ERIC BOWEN

1961 by The Curtis Publishing Company.

The Saturday EI'ening Post .â&#x20AC;˘

Recent novelists tend to explore rather than arrange or synthesize their materials; often their arrangement is random rather than sequential. In the older tradition, a novel was a formal structure composed of actions and reactions which were finished by the end of the story, which did have an end. The modern novel often has no such finality." Aaron Copland characterizes the music of our young composers as a "disrelation of unrelated tones. Notes are strewn about like membra disjecta; there is an end to continuity in the old sense and an end of thematic relationships."

Anthropological philosophy has replaced metaphysics. In the wake of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, attention has turned from objective reality to the individual human personality struggling for self-realization. "Being" remains interesting only as it relates to man. As its order, if it has one, is unknown to us, being cannot be described as it is in itself; but if it is believed to be mysteriously wonderful, as some existentialists think, we should remain open to it. If it is the blind, meaningless enemy, as others suspect, we should maintain our freedom against it.

Even theology, for all its renewed theocentrism, keeps one eye steadily on man, as when the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann relates faith to the achievement of authentic selfhood. It is in art, however, that the shift from outer to inner has been most evident. If the twentieth century began by abolishing the distinction between sublime and banal subject matter, it has gone on to dispense with subject matter altogether. Although the tide may have begun to turn, the purest art is still widely felt to be entirely abstract and free of pictorial representation. It is as if the artist had taken the scientist seriously and responded, "If what I see as nature doesn't represent the way things really are, why should I credit this appearance with its former importance? Better to turn to what I am sure of: my own intuitions and the purely formal values inherent in the relations of colours, shapes and masses."

I have argued that the distinctive feature of the contemporary Western mind as evidenced by frontier thinking in science, philosophy, theology and the arts is its acceptance of reality as unordered in any objective way that man's mind can discern. This accept-

ance separates the Post-Modern Mind of Western thought from both the modern mind, which assumed that reality is objectively ordered, and the Christian mind, which assumed it to be regulated by an inscrutable but beneficent will.

It remains only to add my personal suspicion that the change from the vision of reality as ordered to unordered has brought Western man to as sharp a fork in history as he has faced. Either it is possible for man to live indefinitely with his world out offocus, or it is not. I suspect that it is not, that a will-to-order and orientation is rather fundamental in the human make-up. If so, the postmodern period, like all the intellectual epochs that preceded it, will turn out to be a transition to a still different perspective.

But if reality ..does get reordered for the Western mind, this order is certain to be very different from that which the modern mind envisioned. What it will be like cannot at this juncture be surmised. The most that can be ventured is the abstract prediction that it will be more complicated than the modern mind suspected and that its order will be recognized as partially imposed by man's mind and not just passively mirrored within it. The order will not describe reality as it exists by itself apart from us. Instead it will describe an ellipse in which man in his entirety-his purposes and feelings as well as his intellect-stands as one focus in balance and tension with its complementing focus: the cosmos in which his life is set and against which his destiny must be enacted .â&#x20AC;˘ Span

June

1962

15

a horse race, and the em barrassed networks finally cut them off the air entirely.

To a certain kind of humanist, it might seem like a hopeful trend, but what it really indicates is a rather strange period of adjustment.

Machines and human beings are simply getting used to each other. Until recently, there has been panicky inclination to greet every advance in the very special technology of the electronic computers with fear and trembling for man's condition, or with wild expectation of a robot-ruled Utopia. ow, however, people are taking a more reasoned view of "thinking machines."

For instance, it is doubtful if the science-fiction myth of infallibility and superhuman intelligence that once attended these machines survived election night intact. At the same time it is quite clear that I.B.M. 7090's 8: 14 p.m. prediction, based on only 3 per cent of the vote, that Kennedy would win 51 per cent of the popular vote and win in the Electoral College, 297 to 240, was an extremely respectable achievement. The computer will no longer be looked to as an oracle, or feared as a corrupter of the voting populace; it will be taken, instead, for what it really is: a machine.

This mundane truth has been lost for quite a while because of the astonishingly rapid evolution of the computer, a technological advance that greatly helped to build the myth of machine invincibility. In little more than a decade, machines, which once only performed man's physical labour, have come to do a part of his managing and "thinking" in business, industry, military affairs and science. Business machines now keep track of magazine subscriptions, the accuracy of income tax returns, pay checks, automobile licences, refrigerator payments and innumerable personnel matters far better than any army of file clerks. on a Automation has brought second Industrial Revolution, in which machines not only produce goods but also regulate and even improve their own production of goods. "At the heart of every defense system," a military leader recently remarked, "you will find a computer."

Dr. Norbert Wiener, founder of the science of cybernetics, which helped create the electronic brains, now believes that it is "quite in the cards that learning machines will be used to program (draw the conclusions for) the pushing of the button in a new push-button warfare." There is the clear danÂĽer that machines "may produce a policy which would win a nominal victory on points at the cost of every interest we have at heart, even that of national survival."

This nightmarish prospect, however, is only the extreme of that general unease which seems to grow with every step in the machines' progressthe quite human suspicion that a steadily improving machinate intelligence may be subtly challenging man's primacy as a "thinking being."

When Dr. Wiener states that it is his thesis "that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, and that in doing so they may be both effective and dangerous," or when announcement is made that the equivalent of human memory

One electronic brain has composed an "Illiac Suite for String Q:/Qrtet."

can be electronically etched on a sixinch glass disk, there is some cause for concern.

It is reminiscent of the questions Samuel Butler once asked in "Erewhon": "May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate, machine-tickling aphid?"

Present machines have hardly reduced man to any form of aphid, but there is some question about the direction in which the evolving computers are tending-indeed, about the very goals some scientists want them eventually to achieve. Some of the "computer people" are actively at work on the development of an artificial intelligence, hoping to create machines that can work "in collaboration with" man.

Some idea of the scope of this future collaboration can be gathered

from the optImIsm of one M.l.T. physicist who was asked if he felt it was really possible to simulate human intelligence in a computer.

"I don't know whether we'll exactly duplicate it," he said, "but I'm pretty sure we can surpass it."

In light of these aspirations, which seem the very substance of man's wary vision of the machine's becoming his overlord, it is well to keep firmly in mind what present machines-and, probably, any future machines-can actually do. Computers have impressive capabilities, including precisions and speeds beyond human capacity, but they also have genuine limitations that, unless transcended, will keep even the most complex machines in the happily subservient state of a glorified abacus.

Obviously an abacus has no intelligence, an attribute loosely defined as "the power of understanding," and more narrowly defined as "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

But what is obvious in the case of an abacus becomes unfortunately obscured in the case of a machine that can manipulate by its own power a million "bits"-electronic charges the that represent information-in time it takes an external finger to shift a single abacus bead. The speed and magnitude of a computer's calculations too often override important questions as to whether the computer or has a power of understanding, whether its desired goals must not always be set up by other intelligences, i.e., those that are human.

Nevertheless, the startling results of these swift calculations have led some enthusiasts to equate the electronic computer with the human brain, an equation which has a sound mechanical basis in that either can be taken as a limited model for the other, but which fails to take note of certain marked differences that still exist in degree, and perhaps in kind. However, the machine has gained the benefit of this comparison, and its mechanical capacities are frequently discussed as if they were indeed human attributes.

A machine, for instance, is said to have a "memory." An electronic computer stores electronic "bits"-which may signify a number or a plotted critical point-in a magnetic memory, and by its own internal workings gains access to these "bits" when it requires them for its computations. The process is analogous, though far from exactly correspondent, to the storing of information as electric impulses in the neuron loops of the human brain and the retrieving of this information through as yet little understood connections within the cerebral cortex.

THIN KING MACHINES

Electronic brains can scan a book but cannot read for pleasu~e.

Similarly, a machine can "learn" by committing its mistakes and its correct hits to "memory." I.B.M. 704 has been programmed to play checkers, and after ten to twenty hours of working and indoctrination, it often "learns" to play a better game than the man who programmed it. Its only problem seems to be the end game, where-because it has many more courses of action from which to choose than it had when it opened the game-it is "somewhat clumsy in determining the best way to give the coup de grace."

A machine is capable of "logical reasoning." In fact, a computer's circuitry is really the translation of a mathematical logic into a system of electronics.

A machine can "read." Through a process known as optical scanning, the machine recognizes a patterna number or a letter of the alphabetand translates this pattern into the electronic "bits" that compose its own internal language. It may store these "bits" in its memory (e.g., record information read from the faces of cancelled checks in a bank), or reinterpret them for a specific output (e.g., translate Russian into English).

And finally-to stretch the point as far as some of the computer people have done-machines are presumably capable of "creating works of art."

In any case, Lejaren a Hiller Jr. and L. M. Issacson hold a copyright for their "Illiac Suite for String Quartet," a composition on/by computer that calls to mind, according to Issacson, "passages from, say, a Bartok quartet. " This rather ludicrous extension of the machine-brain equation to artistic creativity perhaps best illustrates its limitations. No machine is ever really

(Continued)

likely to contain the artist within its electrophysics, and to a greater or lesser degree, it is unlikely that machine equivalents will be constructed for the highest of human attributes.

It is possible to say that machines can "read," "memorize," "learn," "telephone," "translate," "teach," "compose," etc., but the terms are only analogies. Machines do none of these things at present-nor do they seem destined to in the future-with the fullness of the human endowment.

There is no reading machine that "reads with pleasure," and even over the telephone, there is no real gossip between data processors.

In actuality, the machine, more often than not, suffers by comparison with the human brain. Its memory, for example, is much inferior to human memory. The machine has total recall -it never "forgets" anything, unless instructed to do so-but it literally has nothing more. The richness of associations in the human memory escapes the machine entirely.

The machine is also relatively slow in dredging up information from its tape or grid. The human brain has a hundredth-of-a-second access to over 100,000,000,000,000 memorials of its past experience, and so far no mechanical memory has even approached this facility in retrieving information.

Pattern recognition in the machine -its ability to "see" in order to "read" -is rudimentary compared to a similar function in the human brain.

If shown a large "s" and a small "s," for example, a machine has distinct problems identifying the s-ness of the two symbols and concluding their similarity-a task the human brain can perform even when "8" or "s" is completely distorted by bad perspective. In other words, the machine has great difficulty handling abstractions, even of the simplest order.

Not only abstractions, but also inferences. For all its supposed cerebration, the machine has yet to "understand" a simple declarative sentence. That is, it cannot draw inferences from information supplied to it and thereafter reach conclusions in and of its own volition.

A machine is really spoken toprogrammed-in a long, precise series of imperative sentences. It must be commanded, and every step in its computations demands the issuing of a fresh command. And the only available commander is the human being.

The human brain, of course, needs no commander, no external programmer to instruct it on such a basic level. It can draw inferences, reach conclusions, speculate, and so on, without-and the expression is

appropriate-thinking twice about it.

Much follows from these limitations on machinate intelligence. A machine that cannot draw inferences is hardly capable of referring to itself in any meaningful way. It can be commanded to use the word "I" in a strictly mechanical fashion, but such an "I" is only a typewriter trick. Until a machine can in some internal way refer to itself with a meaningful recognition of its own entity, it will lack many essentials of a total intelligence.

Even if the difficult question of consciousness is left aside, there still remain problems. A computer has no sense of subjective time, for instance, nor can it comprehend any relationship in which it stands; e.g., even when it is playing a masterful game of checkers, it doesn't know that it is now playing a game, or that it even Ins an opponent.

In sum, a machine now lacks what is most commonly referred to as common sense, that extremely complex and total capacity of the human brain to form judgments in everyday situations that involve itself and a variety of conflicting and uncertain factors. With a little patience, for instance, the average human being can find his way out of a traffic snarl or arrange his time on a disorganized and crowded day, but for even the most complex computer such tasks of adjustment as these are at present impossible.

Machines are often said to be "stupid" as a result of these limitations, but the accusation is unfair.

The machine is simply not wired that way. A computer at present operates in series. That is, it goes step by step through a problem, so that even though it is computing at microsecond speed, it is dealing with only one piece of information at a time.

The human brain, on the other hand, operates in parallel: at any given microsecond, infinite channels are supplying it with information, clues, reminders of things acquired over the years. The human brain thinks about so much more in any fraction of time than the electronic brain that they really become two different instruments.

In fact, it is much more instructive to take the machine out of the specific equation with the human brain, and examine it by itself. Then its unique capabilities appear much less forbidding, much more important to mankind. Without the speed and accuracy of the computer in its multitudinous, if rigid, computations, certain problems might take years to solve. And some would not be effectively solved at all-if, for example, the problem were the tracking of an enemy missile

BUTTON-SIZED power amplifiers for high fidelity record players are held up befare their conventional equivalents.

MINUSCULE

MAGIC

(Continued)

MICROCIRCUIT atop peg enables a computer to add and performs same function as stack of yellow circuit boards above it.

The solid-state physicist deals with the structure and properties of matter in solid form, rather than as gas or liquid. In solids, atoms and molecules are usually held together in crystal formations in which each atom's movement is tightly restricted. Each atom is bound in with its neighbours by positive or negative electrical forces involving electrons that in some cases may move from atom to atom in electrical "conduction bands." Metals have crystals that contain many such free electrons and are excellent conductors. Some materials, devoid of migrant electrons, cannot carry electricity. A third type of crystals, called semiconductors, have few free electrons when in their pure state but gain such charge-carriers when certain impurities are added to them. Here, then, is the stage for minuscule magic.

Solid-state physicists and engineers can, by selecting and arranging impurities in semiconductors, put carriers of one kind in one region of a device and carriers of another kind in another region. Two devices, the diode and the transistor, illustrate results. Made of a semiconductive material in which impurities make one region positive and one negative, the diode carries electricity in only one direction, and changes alternating current into direct current.

The transistor, with three regions, acts MAGNIFIED VIEW of punch and tweezers used to attach wire to tiny electronic part.

"The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.'

President John F. Kennedy, United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 1961.

of

Disarmament vast outlays of expenditure would be necessary in the coming years and in which additional resources would be particularly welcome. The world's population is increasing by 50 to 60 million people every year, mainly in urban areas, and everywhere governments are faced with the problems of urban renewal and development-slum clearance, low-cost housing and provision of civic services.

In India an investment of about a billion dollars-Rs. 475 crores-a year will be called for to house the new inhabitants of cities with over 100,000people, and an equal sum will be needed to provide public utility services for the additional housing.

In the United States the National Planning Association estimated in 1959 a cumulative expenditure of $100 billion, or Rs. 47,500 crores, on urban renewal during the next five years.

Educational needs are rising everywhere. In the more developed countries, as technical progress spreads ever wider, there will be an increasing demand for better scientific, professional and technological skills and a corresponding increase in investment for higher education. Many

by V. S. Nanda less-developed countries still have illiteracy rates of over fifty per cent of the adult population and there is much leeway to make up before the benefits of even primary education are available to everyone. The magnitude of the educational problem is exemplified by a UNESCO programme recently adopted for thirtyfive states and territories of Africa.

The total estimated cost of this programme ranges from $590 million (Rs. 280 crores) in the first year to $1,150 million (Rs. 576 crores) in 1965, $1,880 million (Rs. 893 crores) in 1970 and $2,600 million (Rs. 1,235 crores) in 1980.

THESE are only some of the major fields into which the funds made available by disarmament should be diverted to enhance existing resources.

There is urgent need for an expansion of many other welfare activitieschild welfare services, vocational rehabilitation agencies, community centres, to name only three. Extension of basic scientific research for peaceful and constructive purposes offers considerable scope for employment of

both financial and technical resources.

There are many projects, in such areas as medicine, urban development and reorganization, meteorology, tele-communications and air transport, utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, space research, and exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, which could be undertaken with international co-operation and backed by adequate finances from funds released by disarmament.

The potentialities for employment of the resources freed by disarmament, to meet current and impending needs, are almost unlimited: in fact, they would still be inadequate to meet the many claims upon them. But there are the allied problems of the impacts of disarmament on national production and employment and on international economic relations. The UN committee of experts examined these problems and came to the conclusion that efficient planning techniques could bring about the desired adjustments without any serious disruption of national economies.

The committee pointed out that the conversion of resources following the end of the Second World War was much larger than would be required by total disarmament at present. In the last years of the war about half of the world's resources were devoted to destruction and the number of people in uniform was four times as high as today. There was large-scale devastation and almost complete disruption of internal and international trade. Yet recovery was rapid and impressive. Huge armies of some of the allies were quickly demobilized and most of the available manpower absorbed by civilian occupations.

Plant and equipment released from wartime production were immediately adapted to producing consumer goods which had been in short supply during the war. In the United States, by the end of the war, the military budget accounted for over 40 per cent of the gross national product. In 1945-46, however, the United States' military expenditure was cut to only onefifth of the war figure, and in the same period the size of the U.S. armed forces was reduced by over 9 million men! The present military budget of the United States is less than 10 per cent of the gross national product.

trade barriers between countries would be reduced. International trade should expand greatly. Exports of such products as petroleum, rubber and metallic ores, which at present are affected by direct and indirect demands for military purposes, might be disturbed. But, if military expenditure is fully replaced by public and private non-military spending, the effect on overall demand would be relatively minor and ultimately adjusted to existing or higher levels. In cases of serious difficulties arising from declines in demand for particular commodities, the countries concerned might receive special forms of assistance during the period of adjustment.

For developing countries disarmament is likely to have especially beneficial results. To the extent that these countries are purchasing munitions from abroad, disarmament would release valuable foreign ex-

change to finance import of capital goods and equipment for economic growth.

A reduction of defence budgets should also improve the prospects for co-operative international action and additional economic aid programmes. Even a fraction of the resources currently devoted to military purposes could make a major contribution to investment for productive development and lead to a marked increase in the rate of growth of real income in the countries with low per capita incomes.

Finally, apart from the social objectives already discussed, there are certain aspects of social life relating to the individual and the family, on which disarmament would have immeasurable benevolent effects.

Compulsory military service could be eliminated and with it the serviceman's separation from his family and its attendant problems. Greater pro-

ductivity might well result in a reduction in working hours and an increase in leisure. Opportunities for cultural pursuits should multiply. The arts should benefit from increased international cultural exchanges and increased patronage.

It is significant that these conclusions were reached by a panel of experts from countries with varying political and economic ideologies.

Everywhere hopes and aspirations must be kindled by their unanimous findings. With so much promise for a better world resting upon the decision of the major military powers to renounce armament and warfare, peace-loving peoples must urge all the heavily-armed nations to evolve real and sincere plans to eliminate armament and warfare and to guarantee with effective control measures that rearmament shall not be secretly resumed in disregard of humanity .â&#x20AC;˘

inevitably wonders, that man is so locked in his own type of intelligence -an intelligence that is linked to a prehensile, grasping hand giving him power over his environmentthat he is unable to comprehend the intellectual life of a highly endowed creature from another domain such as the sea?

Perhaps the water barrier has shut us away from a potentially communicative and jolly companion. Perhaps we have some things still to learn from the natural world around us before we turn to the far shores of space and whatever creatures may await us there. After all, the porpoise is a mammal. He shares with us an ancient way of birth and affectionate motherhood.

His blood is warm, he breathes air as we do. We both bear in our bodies the remnants of a common skeleton torn asunder for divergent purposes far back in the dim dawn of mammalian life. The porpoise has been superficially streamlined like a fish.

His are not, however, the coldblooded ways of the true fishes.

Far higher on the tree of life than fishes, the dolphin's paddles are madeover paws, rather than fins. He is an ever-constant reminder of the versatility of life and its willingness to pass through strange dimensions of experience. There are environmental worlds on earth every bit as weird as what we may imagine to revolve by far-off suns. It is our superficial familiarity with this planet that inhibits our appreciation of the unknown until a porpoise, rearing from a tank to say Three- Two-Three, re-creates for us the utter wonder of childhood.

Unless we are specialists in the study of communication and its relation to intelligence, however, we are apt to oversimplify or define poorly what intelligence is, what communication and language are, and thus confuse and mystify both ourselves and others. The mysteries surrounding the behaviour of the bottlenosed porpoise, and even of man himself, are not things to be probed simply by the dissector's scalpel. They lie deeper.

They involve the whole nature of the mind and its role in the universe.

We are forced to ask ourselves whether native intelligence in another form than man's might be as high, or even higher than his own, yet be marked by no such material monuments as man has placed upon the earth. At first glance we are alien to this idea, because man is particularly a creature who has turned the tables on his environment so that he is now engrossed in shaping it, rather than being shaped by it. Man expresses himself upon his environ-

ment through the use of tools. We therefore tend to equate the use of tools in a one-to-one relationship with intelligence.

The question we must now ask ourselves, however, is whether this involves an unconsciously mancentred way of looking at intelligence.

Let us try for a moment to enter the dolphin's kingdom and the dolphin's body, retaining, at the same time, our human intelligence. In this imaginative act, it may be possible to divest ourselves of certain human preconceptions about our kind of intelligence and at the same time to see more clearly why mind, even advanced mind, may have manifestations other than the tools and railroad tracks and laboratories that we regard as evidence of intellect.

If we are particularly adept in escaping from our own bodies, we may even learn to discount a little the kind of world of rockets and death that our type of busy human curiosity, linked to a hand noted for its ability to open assorted Pandora's boxes, has succeeded in foisting upon the world as a symbol of universal intelligence.

We have now sacrificed, in our imagination, our hands for flippers and our familiar land environment for the ocean. We will go down into the deep waters as naked of possessions as when we entered life itself.

We will take with us one thing alone that exists among porpoises as among men: an ingrained biological gregariousness-a sociality that in our new world will permit us to run in schools, just as early man ran in the packs that were his ancient anthropoid heritage. We will assume in the light of Dr. Lilly's researches that our native intelligence, as distinguished from our culturally transmitted habits, is very high. The waters have closed finally over us, our paws have been sacrificed for the necessary flippers with which to navigate.

The result is immediately evident and quite clear: No matter how well we communicate with our fellows through the water medium we will never build drowned empires in the coral; we will never inscribe on palace walls the victorious boasts of porpoise kings. We will know only water and the wastes of water beyond the power of man to describe. We will be secret visitors in hidden canyons beneath the mouths of torrential rivers. We will survey in innocent astonishment the flotsam that pours from the veins of continents-dead men, great serpents, giant trees-or perhaps the little toy boat of a child loosed far upstream will come floating past. Bottles with winking green lights will plunge by us into the all-embracing ooze. Meaning-

Man and the PorpOise: Two Solitary Destinies

LOREN EISELEY, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, is an anthropologist who has written extensively for scientific and literary periodicals on human evolution and natural history.

Dr. Eiseley's most recent book is The Firmament of Time. He is the author also of The Immense Journey and Darwin's Century.

Illustrated with Original Paintings for SPAN

by NAND

Š

K. KATYAL

1960 by the United Chapters

0/

Phi Beta Kappa. The American Scholar.

The Creative

ALL

of us have notions about what is meant by "creativity," or a "creative" person, or "the creative process."

We know, for one thing, that there are different kinds and levels of creativity: that it can be heard in the jam session of a jazz band and seen in Einstein's development of the theory of relativity.

We realize that being highly creative means something more than, or at any rate different from, being highly intelligent, competent, able, skilful; we all knowable people of high intelligence whom we would never dream of calling "creative."

We understand that to be creative means to be original-although, on thinking about it, that can't be all there is to it. The hallucinations of a madman are often highly original, hut we do not call them, or him, "creative. " As far as the creative process goes, we sense that creative individuals seem

Person

to "go at things" in a way that is somehow different from the way most of us do, but we (and they) are not sure precisely how.

We also have ideas about what the creative person is like; we feel in a vague way that we should not expect of him exactly the same kind of behaviour and response that we expect of others. We even realize that he usually works better - under certain conditions; "just leave him alone," we sum it up.

All of these ideas about creativity are true as far as they go, but they are vague and partial truths. We admire creativity, value it, and believe that we should encourage it. Yet we can do little to foster the "creative situation" until we know more about"the nature of creativity itself.

We need to know more about what creative individuals are like as people.

Are there patterns of attitudes, values, interests, and personality that distinŠ Carnegie Corporation of New York Quorterly.

How does the original thinker

guish them from less creative persons?

We need to know more about the creative process. How does the original thinker think?

We need to know more about the kinds of environments that fosteror smother-creativity and high performance. What kinds of support do creative workers need from supervisors, colleagues, society in general?

The research programmes described in the following pages are directed to these questions.

MARK Twain told about the visitor to heaven who told St. Peter he wanted to meet the greatest general who had ever lived. St. Peter obligingly pointed out a nearby angel.

"But that isn't the greatest general in the world!" cried the visitor. "I knew that man in life, and he was a mere cobbler."

"I know," said St. Peter, "but if he had been a general he would have been the greatest of them all."

This is a favourite story of Donald W. MacKinnon, director of the University of California's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), which has for six years been conducting a study of creativity, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Some day, Professor MacKinnon and others hope, it may be possible to predict creativity. But

starting from here and now, if you want to study that elusive quality you have to study people who have proved they are creative.

The IPAR group wanted to learn not only how highly creative people differ in general from people who are less creative, but also how persons who are creative in different fields differ-or do not-from one another.

Consequently they have studied: (1) novelists, essayists, and poets; (2) industrial research scientists and mathematicians; and (3) architects.

The individuals studied were chosen because they were rated as highly creative by distinguished personages in their own fields. In the case of the architects, three groups were chosen for comparative purposes: one, those judged to be highly creative; the next, creative but not markedly so; the third, more run-of-the-mill.

The categories in which these men and women work were selected because they represent the three different kinds of creativity which the IPAR had identified.

In the first of these, the creation is clearly an expression of the inner states of the creator. Composers, expressionist painters, sculptors, and of course creative writers, fall into this category.

In the second form of creativity, the creator acts largely to meet externally defined needs and goals.

He produces a novel and appropriate product, but he adds little of himself

think?

to the result. Experimental physicists, engineers, inventors, and research scientists are representative of this category.

The third form of creativity cuts across the other two, in that the prod uct is both an expression of the creator-and thus a very personal product-and at the same time a meeting of the demands of some external problem.

Architects are perhaps the best example of this; others are certain kinds of writers, representational painters, and musical performers.

The creative "subjects" were studied by the method of personality assessment developed by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. This method involves the administration of a number of different tests, questionnaires, personal interviews, and the eliciting of biographical information. It is possible in this way to learn a great deal about the attitudes, values, interests, preferences, and life histories of individuals.

A composite picture of the "person as a whole" emerges.

How do creative "people as a whole" look?

They are fairly intelligent, at least. ("We had no feeble-minded subjects," says Mr. MacKinnon.) But although a certain amount of intelligence is required, beyond that point being more or less intelligent does not crucially determine the level of an individual's creativity.

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June 1962

39

What about special aptitudes? Early hl life creative individuals show the: skills necessary to their ultimate careers: architects were good at drawing as children; mathematicians always had a talent for math. But many creative people come to their final careers late, because they have so many skills and aptitudes that they find it difficult to choose among them.

Clearly it takes more than intelligence and specialized skills for creativity, so we look to see what interests characterize highly creative persons.

All of them score high on interests which might lead them to be psychologists, architects, author-journalists.

All score Iowan scales for purchasing agents, office workers, bankers, farmmorers, carpenters, policemen-and ticians. (This does not mean that no farmers or bankers are creative.

And it should be remembered that a high level of creativity is not necessary to-or even appropriate to-certain occupations.

One might hesitate to entrust the nation's security to an army composed of highly creative men.)

From the decisive pattern of interests which distinguishes highly creative people, however, we may inferand other signs support the conclusion -that creative talent is not very interested" in small detail, in the practical and the concrete, but is more concerned with the meanings, implications, and symbolic equivalents of things and ideas.

SINCE creative people show a strong congruence of interests, do they also share the same values? They doand the values they share are surprising in some respects.

The German psychologist Spranger has described the six basic values of men as being the aesthetic, economic, political, social, religious, and theoretical. Tests have been devised to measure the relative strength in which these values are held by individuals.

For all the creative types, the aesthetic and the theoretical are the strongest; the economic tends to be the weakest. What is surprising is that the two values which are usually considered to be conflicting are so high 40

span

June 1962

series of drawings of various types they consistently choose those which are more abstract, perhaps chaotic; when offered an opportunity to make mosaic patterns using many or few colours, the highly creative tend to employ more colours, the less creative, fewer.

It seems that the less creative person has to impose order immediately, but that the more creative sees the possibility of imposing a higher level of order baving previously experienced more disorder. and of so nearly the same strength for all creative groups. One would expect a mathematician to value highly the theoretical, which has to do with a rational concern for knowledge and truth. One would expect an architect to value highly the aesthetic, which represents an emotional concern for beauty and form. But that both-and all the other creative groups-give the two values almost equal weight leads to an important conclusion about creative people in general. That is that they are able to tolerate the inner tensions created by holding conflicting values, or-probably closer to the truth-that they resolve the conflict.

This kind of resolution can be seen in the creative. mathematician who ignores certain obvious solutions to a problem in favour of arriving at an "elegant" or beautiful solution.

Other findings support the hypothesis that creative individuals are more able than most to give expression to opposite sides of their nature, to achieve a reconciliation of the conscious and unconscious, reason and passion, rational and irrational. science and art. All the highly creative male groups studied, for example, scored high on a "feminiqity" test: more open in their feelings and emotions, more sensitively aware of themselves and others, and possessing wide-ranging interests-traits which in our culture are considered "feminine."

On the other hand, most of them were not effeminate in manner or appearance, but instead assertive, dominant, and self-confident.

Another indication that creative people are more open to experience from within and without is that they seem to have a positive preference for complexity-even for what appears as disorder.

When presented with a

SO

FAR all the creative types have been, with slight variations, much alike in interests, values, and preferences.

It is when we come to see how they fit into the scheme of "personality types" described by J ung that we see the first significant difference among the "creatives."

Even here, in one respect they are most strikingly similar in that same to one another-and respect most startlingly different from the general population.

Whenever you think, you either become aware of something (perceive) or come to a conclusion about some-

As

a lad of twelve, Eero Saarinen, destined to become one of America's most famous architects, looked out of his hotel window in New York City after his first night in the United States and exclaimed: "The traffic is all wrong; it ought to be changed."

Although he failed to change the traffic pattern of his adopted country, Saarinen's bold genius wrought profound changes in architectural theory and practice. Before his death from a brain tumour in September 1961, he had largely fulfilled what he deemed to be his life's mission and once expressed in these significant words: "There is too much that is ugly. Architecture is too humble. It should be prouder, more aggressive, much richer and larger than we see it today.

I would like to do my part in expanding that richness."

Son of another famous architect, Finnish-born Eliel 42 Span June 1962

Night view, abave, of the facade the auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At left, hands of the architect with the familiar trademark of his pipe.

of

Mary Leela Rao and a fellow Coro intern prepare a report on the administration of criminal justice.

â&#x20AC;˘

India In America

VERSA TlLlTY keynotes the personality of young Mary Leela K. Rao, of Bombay, who has been studying in the United States for the past four years. With athletic prowess of the kind that makes champions, she combines unusual academic talent.

She has a flair for journalism and among her cultural pursuits is a study of Indian classical dances which she can perform with sufficient skill and grace to attract American audiences.

Lately she has also developed a taste for public affairs and public speaking.

Mary Leela, 21, is the daughter of the late Kanakadri Rao, an engineer and industrial consultant who was a graduate of the University of Kansas in the United States, and himself a star of track and field events. Inheriting her father's enthusiasm for sports, she began running when she was only eleven years old. Her father was her first coach. When she enrolled in St. Xavier's College, Bombay, in 1955, she had already attained Olympic standards. She was India's only woman representative, as a sprinter and hurdler, in the 1956 World Olympiad at Melbourne, but unfortunately her performance there was marred by a pulled muscle.

It was Lloyd C. (Bud) Winter, track coach and Associate Professor of Physical Education at San Jose State College, California, who inspired Mary Leela to pursue her athletic training and who later helped her obtain admission to San Jose State College. Bud Winter came to Bombay in 1955 on a tour sponsored by the United States Department of State and Mary Leela attended his training classes. She 'was greatly impressed

Discussing the intricacies of state fiscal operations with the State of California Director of Finance.

with his knowledge and methods and considered him a superb coach. Mary Leela's father was at that time President of the Bombay State Amateur Athletic Association. Winter became a frequent dinner guest at the Rao home and encouraged the young athlete's ambitions. The opportunity for Mary Leela to enrol in San Jose College came three years later in 1958, when she was given a Rotary scholarship and entered a course in journalism and social science.

Mary Leela's career at San Josea public, tax-supported college with about 17,000 students on its roUswas outstanding and marked by unusual activity. In her inaugural year she was initiated into Alpha Phi, a social sorority, and was elected a member of the American National Pan- Hellenic Council-an unusual distinction for a foreign student in the United States. Active in student government, she soon became one of the most popular girls on the campus. She was one of twelve girls elected to the Black Masque, an exclusive honorary schoJastic society.

She also became Vice-President of Theta Sigma Phi, a journalism sorority.

In her senior year she was elected "Homecoming Queen" and, as such, she presided over alumni reunions, dances, dinners and miscellaneous social and athletic activities. In her spare time she worked in the circulation department of the San Jose Mercury and also served as a counsellor in the Santa Clara Youth Village, a teen-age welfare centre.

Her love of athletics has continued to be one of Mary Leela's dominant interests, although, as a serious student, she has not hesitated to assign it to a Reviewing campaign plans with the candidate she supported.

A U.S. Customs chemist shows Mary Leela a poppy pod and bottles of seized narcotics.

The Versatile

Miss Rao

(Continued)

secondary position when necessary.

When it was a question of choosing between her academic studies and attending the Rome Olympics in 1960, which would have entailed a period of intensive training before the games, she chose to continue her studies without interruption.

Benefiting from the guidance of her coach Bud Winter, however, she was able to compete in superlative style at American college and university meets.

Along with Ray Norton, joint holder of the lOa-metre record, Chris von Saltzar, the world swimming star, and the famed basketball player Red Hickey, she was honoured at the "Banquet of Champions."

Her brilliant performances also won her an award from the popular American magazine, Sports Illustrated. Besides 48

Span

June 1962

participating in the sports events at San Jose, she helped organize track and field teams and programmes for girls.

Mary Leela had intended to continue her social science studies at San Jose for a Master's degree, and possiHer plans were, bly a doctorate. however, upset when she was called home in March 1961 on the sudden death of her father. In the meantime she had applied to the Coro Foundation in San Francisco for an Internship in Public Affairs and, while in Bombay, she wrote two essays as part of the final test for the coveted internship.

She passed the test, and her selection as the first Indian student to win the scholarship added another honour to her impressive list of achievements. She returned to the United

Three Olympic sportsmen compare notes at Califarnia University.

States in September 1961 to enter the internshi p.

Coro Foundation was established in 1942 with the object of carrying out research and education in public affairs and training selected young men and women in various aspects of American public life and business administration.

This objective is achieved through an intensive course of study comprising field assignments, regular seminars, talks by guest speakers, interviews with officials and a variety of individual and group projects. The total number of internships awarded annually is twenty-four, twelve for participation in the San Francisco programme and twelve for a separate program me for Los Angeles.

Interns are selected, after careful screening, from a large field of applicants, and assigned for a period of nine months to a series of government and private projects. The assignments include a study of business and labour practices and even political campaigns.

In the business field, interns learn something of the organization, methods and problems of the firm to which they report, with special emphasis on the role of business in public affairs. There are three sevenweek periods of government observational assignments on which interns usually work in teams under the supervision of various departmental heads.

Among the government agencies which co-operate in the programme are the office of the District Attorney, the Civil Service, Public Health, Public Welfare and Police

Departments and Public Utilities.

Interns attend local and state legislative sessions and have informal discussions with civic and political leaders. In political campaigns they are generally assigned to the party of their choice.

Referring to her own experiences as a Coro intern, Mary Leela observed that she has "gone through the alternate process of learning and unlearning many things." She started her programme with a seven-week assignment at the San Francisco City Planning Department, in the course of which she studied plans and charts of land and building development. COIlr currently, she worked on a political campaign on behalf of two cand"idates for re-election to the Board of Supervisors, the legislative body for the City and County of San Francisco.

She reported the campaign a thrilling experience and a challenging introduction to political life. Her part in it covered everything from answering telephone calls and letters to organization, research, publicity work and public speaking. It was a pleasant surprise for American audiences at political meetings when, clad in a lovely silk sari, she mounted the rostrum and exhorted them to vote for her candidates.

One of her assignments was with U.S. Customs where she familiarized herself with inspection techniques and the physical and chemical tests of imported products. She spent four weeks with a large department store and delved into some of the intricacies