MARCUS RASKIN
395
Herman Kahn has said, the problems "might look very different from
those abstract problems actually predicted for the hypothetical France
of 1975 since both 'predictions,' the actual ones about France and the
hypothetical ones by a non-existent supremely competent planner, are
necessarily abstracted from reality." This insistence on interchange–
ability, on projecting elaborate schemes on the basis of information
and ideas ripped out of their original context, universalizes ideas which
by their nature should have only limited meaning or specific objec–
tives. But their inventors refuse to recognize such limitations. Conse–
quently, state bureaucracies revolve around permanent "threat situa–
tions" and defense is seen as a matter of "taking out" particular cities
which need not be named. Accordingly, judgmen.t about ideas is lost
because ideas are severed from human passion.
The scenario is a misuse of man's impulse to imitate and act,
because it defeats what art forms teach us: that there are unique human
acts which cannot be explained through utilitarian language charts.
Stanley Kubrick 's
Dr. Strangelove
teaches us more about nuclear reality
than Herman Kahn's book
On Thermonuclear War
because Kubrick
depicts particular human needs and desires-the unique personhood
beyond the social role. Kubrick's farce deals with passions and, as
Bertrand Russell has said, it is human passion which defines the moral
content of a person's actions. Imaginary ("as if") games are aimed at
denying human passions. In this connection, Paul Goodman pointed
out that bureaucracies develop format language to cover their
activi ties:
Format is Speech colonized, broken-spirited.
It
is a use of speech as
social cement, but it is not like the small talk of acquaintances on the
street in their spontaneous style; it is a collective style for a mass.. . .
Diplomats, administrators of all kinds and other public relators, who
have to make remarks about what is none of our business, have
always used a style to drain meaning from what they say.. .. The
government of a complicated modern society cannot lie much. But
by format, even without trying, it can kill feeling, memory, learning,
observation, imagination, logic, grammar, or any other faculty of
free writing.
When we hear Henry Kissinger speak we witness a master of format
language, a language as formalistic and empty as that found in
proposals for government or foundation grants. This language is the
nonreferential, untruthful code which allows men to develop insane
systems of defense, education or economic development-systems
which have lost touch with any human purpose.
