PARTISAN REVIEW
expresses an understandable impatience with the view that from the
standpoint of the present any determinate historical future is as inescap–
able as the past is irreversible. For to believe that the character of the
future is in all fundamental respects now completely determined and
at the same time to speak-as who does not?-<>f our historical period
as one of great decisions, is intellectually incoherent.
No less incoherent, however, is the reaction which such a view
begets
if
we read the sentence quoted from Popper with the same
literalness with which Popper reads Plato and Marx. (I shall say some–
thing later about Popper's manner of reading.)
If
Popper means to
say that everything is possible in human affairs because nothing is
logically necessary, then
this
is true not only in human affairs but
in nature as well. The denial of any physical law is not logically self–
contradictory. To
be
consistent Popper would have to assert that if any–
thing can happen in history, anything can happen in nature. Our naive
belief, then, that human affairs are conditioned by the
air
we breathe
and the food we eat must
be
dismissed as a prejudice. We may find
nourishment in stones, and health in the fumes of cyanide. Logically
both in history and nature, anything can happen at any time at any
place
to
anyone. This may
be
an unprejudiced view of politics.
It
is
obviously an insane view as anyone can discover if he tries to act on it.
Indeed, one of the marks of sanity is the realization that not every–
thing can happen in nature. Wishes cannot
be
ridden like horses and
pious thoughts cannot turn away flying missiles.
If
it is false that every–
thing can happen in nature, it is also false that everything can happen
in human affairs because all human affairs depend upon regularities
in natural affairs. We must therefore conclude it is one of the principles
of any sane view of politics to
disb elieve
that everything is possible
in human affairs. And Popper himself in his less splenetic moods must
agree
with this. For otherwise everything he says about the desirability
and practicability of piece;neal social engineering is nonsense.
Can we hold the position that there are determinate connections or
causal laws relating groups of events without embracing the myth of
inevitability and other mystical doctrines? Obviously. In the natural
sciences on the basis of such general laws and knowledge of particular
situations, we can predict occurrences without treating the events pre–
dicted as fatalities. Sometimes we can forestall the event we predict
by intervening into naturar processes. The things we create, the things
we control, are testimony to the power which knowledge of natural
determinations gives us over nature-not complete power but enough
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