Oregon daily emerald., January 06, 1971, Page 13, Image 13

Opinions
D.J.R. Bruckner
Can colleges make us civilized?
Almost everyone has some notion of
changes he would like to make in the
systems of education. There is a kind of
public obsession with what formal
education does to or for the people. We
would not be putting the blame for so many
of our social troubles on schools and
colleges if we did not believe that these
institutions, ideally, could civilize their
students, establish the standards of
everyday life and restore order to the
society. But in the long run it is what we do
that shapes our lives, not only what we
know, and the business of civilization is
much too great, too complex to be left in
the hands of the schools.
Lying under the popular belief in the
power of institutional education, one
suspects, is blank ignorance of what
civilized life is. For generations the people
have simply accepted the entire order of
life as though it were natural; they have
used it as though it were a natural force,
with no perception of how it is contrived.
Ortega Y Gasset’s formulation is apt:
“The world is a civilized one, its inhabitant
is not.”
The nation’s schools and universities
are probably capable of doing a better job
of revealing to the people the complex
order of life, but, in their nature, they are
not capable of setting the standards of life.
And standards, after all, are the definers
of everyday order; we cannot live together
without them. They are the shapers of con
duct, of behavior, and thus of events; and
in this matter of standards, the people who
control and move the institutions of life
• are simply more important than the people
who only talk about them well. The great
teachers of life are not, in fact, the people
who make their living teaching.
Probably the most effective teachers,
certainly the great shapers of everyday
affairs, are the members of the'
professions—lawyers, doctors, engineers,
scientists, economists, architects, even
journalists in the many media. You need
only consider how different life would be
without the engineers of highways and
automobilies to see how much power the
professions really have.
It is widely believed that the orderly
system of life in the nation is collapsing,
and that few individuals have the power to
effect any change. Behind this popular,
and quite revolutionary, belief, I suspect is
a failure of personal responsibility, a
decay of standards in the professions.
- Consider medicine. The infant mor
tality rate in the nation is higher than that
in most western European nations. The
certified cases of damage, even death,
resulting from some prescription drugs
. are many. The drug industry is inventive,
all right, and very profitable. American
hospitals may be the most expensive in the
world, but there is no reason to believe
they are, therefore, the best. The people
have been allowed to lose the concept of
health as the normal condition of life. The
medical profession has the expertise, and
the prestige, to correct many of these
problems, and very conspicuous political •
power.
Lawyers are the fabricators of the
entire system of contract— personal,
corporate, governmental—that defies the
limits of personal action and responsibility
in the entire society. If judges are lazy or
stupid, if access to the power and
protection of law is closed to the old, the
young, the poor, the accused, what are the
lawyers doing?
Engineers and inventors of machines
can build almost anything imaginable. In
combination with architects they can build
structures to contain any function, on
order. But whose order? If you look at our
cities, you feel that not everything
imaginable should be built. ^
Scientists have gained enormous
power of manipulation. What the
physicists and chemists can do is scarcely
credible. But we eat food that does not
nourish, breathe air that kills and ruin the
waters of the earth with the products of
scientific discovery. Discovery may be
important, but to the people the uses of
what is discovered are more important.
That is the whole point of standards.
Economists have grown into a
powerful profession in a short time, and a
very creative one. Look at the evidence:
•corporations swallowing one another in
wave upon wave; an international cult of
the maximization of profits, a system of
international exchange that concentrates
power over money. To the average man it
seems the creativity of the profession has
gone into the service of inhuman distor
tions.
Hie professionals will always object t
hat they do not make the great decisions of
life, that these are made by the owners of
the world. The architect argues that, if he
does not build this monstrous building, the
developer will hire someone else to build a
worse one. The engmeer insists that
management in Detroit and in the oil
companies determine the condition of
cars, or that politicians determine the
shape and location of highways. This is the
common defense.
But these men have an overriding
obligation to humanity. Not all jobs or all
actions are decent; it is not fit for men to
do everything imaginable. Nor is it enough
for the professions to establish ethical,
personal standards of performance within
themselves; it is their proper role at times
to become public, even political, to raise
objections, to make public inquiry and to
use public criticism to help the people
understand the depth, complexity and
fragility of this civilization.
That is the demand, the real standard
of citizenship; it is at once simple and
difficult: “No excuses are appropriate.”
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News
Service
Stanley Karnow
Vietnam War took careful planning
Most efforts to reconstruct the history
of our entanglement in Vietnam argue that
we oozed into that quagmire through a
series of small moves inadvertently taken
by a succession of reluctant presidents.
But now, working separately, two
former Defense Department specialists
have come up with a new set of
provocative studies that challenge the
comfortable thesis that we slid blindly into
Vietnam.
One of these analysts, Daniel Ellsberg,
is currently at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. The other, Leslie H. Gelb,
is at present with the Brookings In
stitution. They both presented their studies
to an American Political Science
Association meeting in September.
Though they differ in certain respects,
both submit that our Vietnam in
volvement, far from having been ac
cidental, resulted from deliberately
calculated White House decisions made
with a mixture of hope and doom.
Gelb contends that “those who led the
United States did not stumble, fumble or
carelessly step into the quicksand of
Vietnam.” On the contrary, he asserts, the
American leaders “had a much better
sense of where they were heading than
they let the public know.”
While no president viewed Vietnam as
intrinsically important, Gelb says, each
regarded it as “vital” because he in
terpreted disengagement to mean defeat
that would damage America’s prestige
abroad and his own political position at
home.
Accordingly, Gelb suggests, every
president “persevered” in the belief that
he could compel the communists to
relent—though each escalated only to the
degree he considered minimal. Thus the
process of involvement was gradual, yet
explained in verbiage that made Vietnam
a “test case of U.S. credibility” for our
enemies, our allies and especially our
selves.
The key affirmation in Gelb’s study,
then, is that while every administration
was tragically aware of its inability to
solve the Vietnam problem, each ex
panded our commitment because that
seemed to be the only way to avoid or
postpone paying the costs of failure that
our own spokesmen had rhetorically in
flated.
President Eisenhower, for example,
conceded that the communists could
“possibly” have won 80 per cent of the
votes in an election. Still, he saw “no real
alternative” to hanging on in Vietnam lest
the dominoes fall throughout southeast
Asia.
Similarly, President Kennedy is
reported to have been skeptical about our
chances. But he also subscribed to the
domino theory and therefore opposed a
withdrawal that, he said, would “give the
impression that the wave of the future in
Southeast Asia was China and the com
munists.”
Not only did Lyndon Johnson insist as
well that there were “no alternatives” but,
as Gelb suggests, he plunged deeper into
Vietnam partly because he was untroubled
by other world crises, partly because the
war had become desperate, and partly
because U.S. conventional forces had been
built up sufficiently to permit intervention.
Moreover, the bureaucratic and
political stakes in the conflict had grown
and hardened to the point at which Viet
nam was more “vital” than ever. Con
sequently, President Johnson’s “peace
overtures” were contrived more to placate
American doves than to achieve a genuine
settlement.
Reviewing the same period in his
parallel study, Ellsberg rejects the
arguments of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
Townsend Hoopes, Richard Goodwin and
others that there are no villains in the
Vietnam drama.
In Ellsberg’s opinion, our increasing
involvement stemmed from what he
sardonically labels a “process of im
maculate deception” by presidents, who
knew, yet failed to inform the public where
their strategies might steer the country.
As early as 1961, Ellsberg points out,
the Kennedy Administration camouflaged
General Maxwell Taylor’s proposal to
send U.S. combat troops to Vietnam,
thereby withholding from the public the
seriousness of a situation that would later
engulf us.
Ellsberg recalls from personal ex
perience in the Defense Department in
1965 that, while President Johnson was
publicly playing down the prospect of
further escalation, the Pentagon was
acting on White House orders to raise
American troop levels in Vietnam.
Mr. Johnson justified his commitment
by claiming that “this is a bad year to lose
Vietnam to the communists.” But, ac
cording to Ellsberg, every president since
Harry Truman used that formula as his
rationale.
Against this background, a crucial
question at the moment is whether
President Nixon is behaving differently—
or whether he is following in the same
track.
Like the presidents who went before
him, Mr. Nixon has made it plain in his
speeches that he considers Vietnam to be
“vital.” In addition, he clearly stated as he
invaded Cambodia last spring that he has
no intention of accepting “defeat” in any
form.
Therefore, though he has reduced the
U.S. commitment numerically, the
president has yet to demonstrate in words
or deeds that he really aims to deviate
from the pattern of his predecessors and
disengage completely from what he
himself enlarged into the Indochina War.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News
Serivce
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