164
PARTISAN REVIEW
they have done a good job of social engineering they need not
fear that aggressions inherited from Neanderthal Man will wreck
their society.
What we need to study in human society is how different
social inventions have worked and how they have fostered or
diminished hate and belligerency among people who are mutually
dependent upon each other for necessary services. We need to
study the consequences of fundamentally different arrangements
and to appreciate how many various forms these arrangements
take. One of the reasons for failure of nerve among ·present-day
intellectuals appears to be that some years ago they narrowed
their view of possible arrangements down to two, one of which
they called communism and one something else. When
th~ir
chosen scheme turned out to share in the difficulties created by
the forms of nationalism and the will to power which are rampant
in Western Civilization, they cried havoc. But the original diffi–
culty lay in narrowing the field to two fixed contestants. There
is no need to sign on one or the other dotted line. There are many
possible forms of social order and disotder, and patient and ener·
getic action can bring the one out of the other. We are still far
from any peace time program which makes use of and trains all
men to participate to the best of their ability in the vast activities
of a civilized world. Step by step we must move in that direction,
increasing opportunity and responsibility all down the line. We
see more clearly than we did a few years ago how far short we
fall. We shall need to do our best to improve the conditions. But
until we have stabilized and extended our gains and scotched
some diseases like the business cycle and "depressed areas"
and
our modem version of nationalism, it is only escapism to call
in
Neanderthal Man and make a scapegoat of him. The sources of
our difficulties lie many tens of thousand years closer to us
than
the Old Stone Age.
