4104
WILLIAM YOUNGREN
people. Not only a generally sunny view of things but "morality and
ethics" as well, will then "come naturally." Of course this is nonsense:
there is no more (and no less) reason why knowing that every object
and event is unique should make us feel the world is "vivid with
potentialities" than that it should evoke a vision of chaos, as Pearson's
Grammar of Science
did in Henry Adams. Summing up, Hayakawa
quotes approvingly from
A.
H. Maslow:
As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical
and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the
case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it
be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon
human nature both in himself and others.
The next essay recommends this way of looking at the world to
Negroes. "Negroes simply cannot lose" since "progress is inevitable,"
and so what usually passes for Southern ill-will really exists only "at
the level of words" not of facts; the whole secret "is to forget as far
as possible that one is Negro," a fact whites would gladly forget too,
and will forget when Negroes learn to "act as the white man's psycho–
therapist."
"If
you expect too much of them ... you will be running
into daily disappointments.
If,
however, your expectations are realistic
-in other words, if you expect four out of five white persons to
be
pretty ignorant on the subject [of Negroes}-then you will be delighted
when the score for a given day turns out to be only three out of five."
This breezy advice evidently follows from Korzybski's principle that
"minimum expectation" is "the basis of happiness." To make only the
most obvious criticism: Hayakawa does not see that if some progress
is indeed inevitable in civil rights, it is largely because some Negroes
have had the physical and moral courage and the political sense to
behave quite unextensionally.
So in ethical and social matters the extensional attitude seems to
amount to a passive, mutedly optimistic faith in "history." Next come
two essays, predictably, on status symbols and advertising, and one,
surprisingly, on the philosophy of law (we must "come to terms with
society-as-process" and not try to "escape into a never-never land of
Eternal Verities"). Then two essays on art show us that be to extensional
in esthetic matters means about the same as it does in ethical ones.
Somewhere between 1800 and 1900, artists, like scientists, sensed "the
bankruptcy of the traditional abstra.ctions" and began "creating and
exploring the possibilities of novel symbol-systems" which, by sub–
stituting "the dynamic for the static," created images that convey more
