RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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is
a misuse of science, it is true, but one implicit in the ideology I
am criticizing. For a more humane use of scientific method, grounded
not on technique, know-how, and "does it work?" but rather on a
value judgment as to what life should be like, one must turn to
thinkers quite out of the liberal-socialist mainstream: anarchists like
Kropotkin, decentralists like Geddes, Borsodi and Gandhi, Utopians
like Fourier.
The questions that now interest me are not the "big" ones:
What To Do About Russia?, Is Planning Incompatible with Capital–
ism?, Will There Be a Depression?, Does America Need a Labor
Party or a Revitalized Democratic Party--or just a Dozen More
TVA's ?, Is World Government the Answer to the H-Bomb? These
seem to me either unimportant or unanswerable. So long as the
dominant areas of the world are organized in vast super-states, whose
economic base is large-scale industry and whose political base is tens of
millions of helpless "citizens," I see no hope of significant improve–
ment. Nor do I see any signs that any considerable number of my
fellow-men are now in a mood to break up such monstrosities into
communities human in scale. So in terms of mass action (i.e., of
politics as the word is now generally understood), our problems ap–
pear to be insoluble. They may yield, I believe, only to a more
modest and, so-to-speak, intimate approach. Reform, reconstruction,
even revolution must begin at a much more basic level than we
imagined in the confident thirties.
It is the "small" questions that now seem to me significant.
What is a good life? How do we know what's good and what's bad?
How do people reaJIy live and feel and think in their everyday lives?
What are the most important human needs-taking myself, as that
part of the universe I know best, or at least have been most closely
associated with, as a starting point? How can they be satisfied best,
here and now? Who am I? How can I live lovingly, truthfully,
pleasureably?
The thinkers I have found most helpful in answering, or at
least talking about, these questions are: Christ, Socrates, Diderot,
Jefferson, Thoreau, Herzen, Proudhon, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Simone
Wei! and Albert Schweitzer. Most of these are religious, which is
natural enough, since the above questions are the kind that, in our
age, are asked mostly by religious people. Yet, although when I read
