books in review

Books in Review

Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown By Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz

New York: Wiley, 1998, 361 pp., $41.95

Reviewed by Arnold Kruger

Roberta Gratz and Norman Mintz survey the state of urban versus suburban life in America today, and find a situation perilous to both the downtown areas of modern cities and to their over- stretched suburbs, as well as to the quality of life of the citizens of both. They observe that in the Cold War years of the 1950s it became national policy to disperse the population as widely as possible, as a reaction to the threat of nuclear warfare. Government research and defense industries were moved out of town, Veterans Administration loans were limited to new single-family homes; no apartments and no rehabili- tation of older housing stock were funded. This was also when the Inter- state Highway Act began to create the largest public works program in Ameri- can history, making the country bloom with cloverleafs, look-alike Levittowns, and the ubiquitous mall, nestled within vast acres of paved parking lots.

It has now been fifty years of the middle classes moving up and out of the city, of industry relocating outside the city--and of both taking the tax base with them while requiring fantastic new sums for infrastructure developments like sewers, utilities, and local roads. It seems that mainly the poor and the working classes have been left behind in the downtowns, amid reduced economic prospects and deteriorating in- frastructures. A mythology has arisen too, of the dirty and dangerous slums of the inner city, versus the clean and prosperous communities of the suburbs.

It is Gratz and Mintz's central con-

tention that these tensions between the downtown city and its suburbs, between pedestrians requiring mass transit and our individualistic car culture, and between huge development projects like malls and casinos versus the incremen- tal renewal of historic downtowns, must all be resolved in favor of the human scale and social intricacy of downtown city living. In their words,

The highways and parking lots built since the 1950's have so separated, segregated, and isolated the Ameri- can people that we have become pockets of hostile aliens. The garage door has replaced the front door, the parking lot the public steps to City Hall, and the underground garage the office building lobby. The suburban majority lives in isolating communities, increasingly wailed, gated, guarded, and protected by limited- access roadways. (p. 34)

This alienating, anomic situation is seen as affecting the fabric of democratic egalitarian society in the U.S., insofar as citizens are separated from the rich hothouse of personal and business connections that arise in the city. The authors hold that it is in the public places of the city that community members come together to share ideas and debate the issues of the day, and that this democratic forum is destroyed with the de- population of the cities. This is one of the few false notes in their paean to the benefits of social and economic concentration and diversity in the city, since

upon reflection it becomes obvious that the pubhc realm of debate has for some time existed in the mass media: newspapers, books, magazines, television, radio, and more recently cyberspace.

We are, after all, a largely literate society today. To hark back to a late eighteenth century romantic vision of the Common, where all classes gathered regularly together to dialogue and debate, is not just anachronistic (if it ever existed), it is elitist, and just as firmly anchored in Plato's classicist Academy as is Le Corbusier's Radiant City concept of huge skyscrapers set in vast parklands. Both visions seem to depend on an invisible underclass of slaves to run the world and keep those endless acres of grass cut and tended.

It is an organic metaphor, however, that provides Gratz and Mintz their organizing paradigm for the renewal of urban life in the country's downtowns: urban husbandry. Husbandry is liter- ally the careful management of a house- hold, the cultivation of land and crops, or "the employment of a thing sparingly and to the best advantage," (OED). It is contrasted with the Project Planning seen in developer-driven inner city renewal, where dozens of blocks may be razed and replaced by a stadium, casino, or a gargantuan mall; or where whole neighborhoods may be bulldozed away to make room for a freeway.

The analogy is clear: mass transit for instance can be seen as the urban garden's built-in irrigation system, that nourishes the concentration of mixed residential, retail, and industrial uses. Whereas the far flung tentacles of the freeways, with their widely spaced suburban developments, are out of control weeds that have escaped from the garden. The huge public housing projects that are built on destroyed neighborhoods are like monoculture crop farms established on the ashes of the Amazon rain forest. Chain stores like McDonald's, and the plague of Wal- Marts are like deadly weeds that must be met with determined resistance, or they'll turn the garden into a wasteland. Splendid Victorian homes and store- fronts are the treasured perennials in the urban garden--given pride of place

BOOKS IN REVIEW / 81

rather than being rooted out for the latest showy annual.

It is this very real process of valuing and cultivating the rich compost of urban life that is the means by which North American cities can be brought "back from the edge" of extinction. Basing planning in the community, observing patterns of life in real neighborhoods, asking for the experience and wisdom of members of the district before change is even planned-- these are some of the participatory tech- niques that respect the people who actually constitute our downtown commumtaes, and who have the answers to urban renewal and rebirth questions. This is because they themselves are both the plants in the garden, and can become careful, responsible gardeners if they're given a chance. And in the great tradition of valuing place and finding the universal in the particular, Gratz and Mintz illustrate the process of attend- ing to the health of cities and their districts with the stories of individual, named people--the social actors who have created positive change and who are exem- plars of the adage that the personal is the political.

For example, there is one Victor Steinbrueck of Seattle, who organized opposition to the planned destruction (a.k.a. redevelopment) of the Pike Place Market in 1971 and not only saved it, but created a seven-acre historic district around it. Rebecca Orenstein of Westminster, Maryland initiated a protest that halted a road widening plan that would have destroyed forty mature trees and the entire character of a pedestrian friendly street. More notably, Gall Cincotta first led protests against redhning in her Chicago neighborhood. "Under her leadership an anti-redlining campaign and lobbying effort led to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, forcing many banks to revamp their neighborhood disinvestment pohcies" (p. 165).

These are examples of citizen resistance to the larger forces of profit-driven development, the dominance of the car culture, the conservatism of financial in- stitutions and zoning bodies, and the nar- rowing and blinkering of the urban planning professions. They are also pin pricks that threaten to burst the ideological bal-

loon of endless development that large American corporations have inflated since the 1950s, much to their own enrichment.

Mass transit, for instance was the life- blood of the downtowns and the streetcar suburbs that grew naturally around them up to the 1950s. Trolley lines knitted together urban life in a cheap and conve- nient fashion, promoting pedestrian activity and the integration of people of every class and status. The authors note it is now estabhshed that just after the Sec- ond World War, General Motors, Grey- hound Coach, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Truck, and Firestone Tires formed a secret cabal to buy up and dismantle the entire streetcar system of America--in order to reap gigantic profits from replac- ing that system with buses. They were so successful that today New Orleans and Toronto are famed for maintaining two of the very few functioning streetcar systems in North America.

The mythology of the Western wide open suburban spaces is losing credence in a country where the tax base has been stretched to breaking point by servic- ing suburban residential and mall development. Attention is turning to what remains of the already built and ser- viced downtowns of cities, with their possibilities for frequent, low-cost public transit on streets and corridors that still persist from the trolley age.

Gratz and Mintz offer fine-grained, real world solutions to these conun- drums. For instance, since people must come before cars, and since so many powerful, vested interests support the current car culture, then what ~s needed is a brand new professional: the Pedes- trian Facilitator. This novel position would be responsible for facilitating activity within downtowns, rather than easing traffic flow through those areas. The incumbent would advocate for pedestrian interests by changing one-way streets back to two-way in order to slow traffic and increase the number of people on the streets; create landscaped medians with benches: widen sidewalks and promote street amenities like res- taurant patios; increase the number of traffic lights; permit angled street parking; reduce speed limits; encourage tree planting on streets and medians: and

prevent the proliferation of drive-in businesses.

All these initiatives and more would enable a resurgence of pedestrian friendly street life in the city; and on reflection, they all work to enhance human, community, business, and aesthetic values simply by "taming the car." One might just as well call the new pedestrian facilitator a car tamer. This is a good example of the authors' genuinely innovative think- ing, since such a profession would be truly interdisciplinary: it would amalgamate urban planning, transportation, landscape architecture, traffic engineering, envtron- mental psychology, zoning development, and business administration among others.

Cities Back from the Edge is replete with novel insights, humane values, and celebra- uons of the rich liveliness of community life. The authors are unabashed disciples of Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, and their dehght in her valorization of the organis- mic, mutually supportive functions of the healthy city is plain. All three authors share an attitude of respect for diversity among people as well as between economic uses; and all highlight the emergent aesthetic and cultural properties of urban civilization that are a function of both size and variety, and that only evolve in the modern metropo- hs. And like Jacobs' visionary work, Gratz and Mintz's book is part of the solution to the modern plague of the automobile culture. or rather to the death of culture that separaung people and destroying community entails.

This growing movement of cultivating one's own garden, and treasuring the details of our community fabric may even be part of the antidote to another modern plague: globalization. At least the nurturing of the particularity and the vitality of individual places, and the resistance to spreading mega-development and its corporate sponsors is a genuine step m the right direction.

Arnold Kruger is a social worker at the University of British Columbia Hos- pital and a mental health co-ordinator with the Vancouver Mental Patients'As- sociation. He has written on a wide range of subjects.

82 / SOCIETY �9 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1999

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil By Rudiger Safranski. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 480 pages.

Reviewed by Thelma Z. Lavlne

Who was Heidegger? Since the 1989 bombshell with which Victor Farias' Heidegger and Nazism (and Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: A Political Life in the following year) exposed the involvement with Nazism of Germany's pre- eminent philosopher, the Western world remains in a state of shock. Cover-ups, denials, countercharges, exonerating admissions, the separation of philosophy from character, and attacks upon "inaccuracies" and aggressiveness have never ceased.

The story begins in Messkirch, a small town of peasants and craftsmen, sharing the prevailing culture of Ca- tholicism, conservatism, devotion to the homeland, anti-Semitism, and hatred of liberalism. Heldegger 's childhood world was the small house facing the towering Church of Saint Martin where his father served as sexton. The Catho- lic Church provided the gifted young Martin financial support from his en- trance into the seminary in 1903 until 1916 by which time he found his pledge to preserve the philosophy of St. Tho- mas Aquinas so distasteful, Safranskl says, that his attachment to the Nazi movement was in part because of ~ts anti-clericalism. Safranski does not seem troubled by this or later betray- als. Nevertheless, as tensions mounted in the church between modernist liberal humanists and orthodox church traditionalists, young Heldegger sided strongly with the traditionalists. His critique and hatred of modernity and its materialistic, bourgeois civilization, its political democracy and individuahsm, its rootless sciences, and its destructive technology would be the animating life- long conviction of his philosophy and politics.

He left his theological studies for philosophy and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Frelburg. After non-military training in

World War I, he returned to Freiburg and German defeat, and saw that the fren- zied controversies of the desperate Weimar Republic were bringing philosophic truth to an end. But, help was soon at hand. After intensive study with the renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl, he discovered that Husserl had opened a door to a new philosophy: phenomenology. Reconstructed in Heidegger's hands, phenomenology dispenses with the historic problem of attaining objectively true knowledge, in which it believes science and philosophy to be hopelessly mired. Phenom- enology turns to a radically new problem: the "forgotten" question of Being. What is the meaning of Being? How do human beings relate to Being? Heidegger's greatest single work, the obscurely profound Being and Time, (1927), begins with the analysis of the human being (Dasein). To be a human being is to be aware of existing and to have a sense of being thrown into existence and of having to provide for oneself.

Being and Time's reflections on death and authenticity captivated the academic world, religious leaders, and the general public. Heidegger's repu- tation soon cleared the way for him to replace Husserl in his Freiburg chair with Husserl's support. Heldegger's lectures had become a public attraction. Their oracular delivery was enhanced by his personal appearance--short , dark, peasant-like. To his students, he was the dimly understood, secret king of philosophy.

In what Safranskl describes as "the great metaphysical lectures of 1929- 30," Heidegger began to choose a "hero" among those who bear the "strange fate of being a spur for others, so that philosophizing awakens in them," the role of someone capable of instilling terror into our existence again.

Who can inject this terror? It is Safranski's great insight that Heldegger has already, in his philosophically dramatized imagination, stage-managed the Nazi terror with himself as the Fiihrer. Who would inject the terror? None other than Heldegger himself whose fate is to be a spur for others. To inject terror and to awaken philosophizing are, for him, one and the same.

When the Nazis seized power in Feb- ruary 1933, a thankful mood of deliverance from Weimar democracy and an overwhelming new national spirit swept the country. Heidegger himself was "electrified" and excitedly claimed that it was his own philosophy that understood the meaning of the new Nazi com- mands. He decided that his own command post would be the University of Frelburg, and he engaged in and won a fierce struggle for the position of university rector. Elected May 1, 1933, Heidegger soon joined the Nazi Party and embraced the Fi.ihrer principle and the Nazi reorganization of the university. Prerequisite for taking office was the reinforcement of the anti-Jewish decrees of April 1, 1933 requiring that Jews be dismissed from university positions. The boycott of Jewish businesses and the dismissal of Jewish public employees had already been undertaken.

Heidegger's notorious inaugural address as rector, "The Self Assertion of the German University," was delivered May 27 in accordance with his specifi- cations that the Nazi Party anthem be sung and that "seig heil" be shouted. By "self assertion of the university" Heidegger did not mean its upholding of the principle of academic freedom, which he scorned as democratic. The true essence of the university is learn- ing, the defiant will to knowledge which arose with the ancient Greeks. "Heldegger dramatized the history of truth in the form of a first awakening to truth among the Greeks," according to Safranski. Now, with the coming of the Nazi revolution, there is a glorious second act, the truth of Being, which IS, however, threatened by the scholarship industry in which careers are pursued for the sake of vanity, money, and

84 / S O C I E T Y * S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1999

thecozy, comfortable life. The essence of the German university would now be to will that science and scholarship carry out "the historical mission of the German people ... preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a V o l k . . . . "

Heidegger was suggesting that he himself as philosopher was alone capable of bringing the scholarship of the university in line with the spiritual world of the German people. He called upon teachers and students to work with the Fiihrer to organize and control thought and action in the nation. Heidegger was standing erect, Safranski observes, martially rattling words, ad- dressing students, party bosses, faculty and dignitaries as if they were shock troops under his command, setting out for danger. "He had dreamed himself into the figure of liberator."

Heidegger was now at the height of his power, regarded in government and academic circles as the outstanding German philosopher, and immensely popular in the press. During his year as rector he struggled to move his philosophy to the plane of politics, to so- lidify his intellectual leadership of the Nazi movement by reorganizing and controlling the German universities. Appointed Ffihrer of the university, he brusquely engineered the weakenmg of opposition from the faculty senate. He delivered speeches; engaged in the politics of academic organizations; wrote policy proposals for Nazi government agencies, articles for the press and student newspapers; participated in planning indoctrination camps for teachers and students. He denounced faculty colleagues as liberal democrats, paci- fists, or anti-Nazi. He instituted a code of honor within the University, stating, "We seek to cleanse our ranks of inferior elements and thwart the forces of democracy in the future."

Early in 1933, shortly before emi- grating from Germany, Hannah Arendt wrote to Heidegger asking if it was true "that he excluded Jews from his semi- nars, didn't greet his Jewish colleagues on the street, rejected his Jewish doc- toral students, and behaved like an anti- Semite?" His furious reply was the last

letter he sent to her until 1950. In this letter he listed favors done for Jews, even though he found them "importu- nate?' His personal dealings did in fact become increasingly anti-Semitic and corroborated all of Arendt's fears.

What of Heidegger's closest friends and philosophical confidants: Karl Lowith, Elizabeth Blochmann, Karl Jas- pers, and his lover Hannah Arendt? All were forced to flee Germany except for Jaspers, endangered by his Jewish wife, stripped of his position, living in daily tension with poison capsules at hand. What of his mentor Edmund Husserl-- humiliated and isolated--with whom Heidegger broke off all contact?

How does Safranski respond to his own question: "Is Heidegger anti- Semitic?" Heidegger was not anti- Semitic, he finds, " in the sense of the lunacy of the Nazis." That he was no crude ideological anti-Semite is made clear by his risking a conflict with the Nazi student body by forbidding their display of an anti-Semitic poster. Nor was Heidegger a "cultural" anti-Semite in the sense of claiming the existence of a "Jewish spirit" incompatible with the spirit of the V o l k . Moreover, Safranski points out that "neither in Heidegger's lectures and philosophic writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks" How then could Heidegger accept Na- zism? "Heidegger ' s Nazism was decisionist. What mattered to him was not origin but decision." Safranski cites as an example of "decis ionism" Heidegger's aid to two internationally renowned professors on the ground that their dismissal would be harmful to Freiburg University abroad. What then of the basic anti-Semitic decrees of the Nazi movement? Safranski rephes: "He did not support its actions, but he accepted them." Still further, Safranski refers to Heldegger's "commumty of will" with National Socialism and his feeling that he "belonged to the movement." Having mustered this motley set of interpretations of Heidegger's anti- Semitism in order to make it understand- able, if not forgivable, Safranski quietly moves on.

By early 1934, Heidegger's struggle

to lead and to purify the Nazi movement was over. Most of the Freiburg faculty, we learn, regarded their rector as a radical visionary "gone wild." They were irritated by the loss of seminar or lecture time to his favorite paramilitary ex- ercises organized by S.A. brownshirt students. Conservative university groups feared his militant innovations as a threat to their security. Various hard-line Nazi ideologues denounced him as a "dangerous schizophrenic," an uncontrollable revolutionist, and a metaphysical nihil- ist. The ideological centers of the Nazi administration were tending toward nor- malizing the universities and were coming to share the criticism of Heidegger as pursuing a radical "personal" National Socialism.

Heidegger resigned from the rectorship on April 23, 1934 and re- treated to his cabin in the Black Forest. He now perceived that his fantasized history of Being, with the ancient Greeks as the first stage, and with his own philosophy as the second, fulfilling stage of all history, was not to be realized. He sought out the poet Holderlin in whose sense of his epoch as experiencing the "Night of the Gods," a darkening of the world, and a loss of Being, Heidegger now finds himself reflected. In his lectures on Holderlin Heidegger portrays himself as a herald who arrived too soon and, like Holderlin, was in danger of being rejected by his time.

In the summer of 1940, the war that Hitler started was driving ahead full force with the defeat of France. Triumphantly, Heidegger concluded that this victory showed that Germany had realized Descartes' dream of the technological domination of nature. But by the summer of 1942, he cries out that"the Anglo- Saxon world of Americanism is determined to destroy Europe and thus our homeland .... "

At war's end, came denazification proceedings at Freiburg conducted by the French occupying forces. Heidegger's self-defense was motivated by fear for his house, his library, and his teaching position. Thus he tried to show no sign of guilt, nor did he feel any guilt. He explained that he had committed himself to the National Socialist revolution


for a short time because he regarded it as a metaphysical revolution. When it failed to live up to its promises, he had withdrawn to his philosophic work. Af- ter some wrangling, the military government ruled that Heidegger be deprived of his teaching license and be removed from his post with a reduced pension. But in 1951, he was restored to teaching by the university.

The drastic decision in Heidegger's case by the French military government came significantly, in Safranski's opinion, "at the very moment when his second great career began on the French cultural scene." "Existentialism" had arisen in France in the 1920s and Heidegger's influence blossomed in the 1930s. Persuaded by Raymond Aron, Sartre had gone to Berlin to study Husserl and Heidegger in the winter of 1933-34 without noticing the reality of the Nazi presence.

One of the first products of Sartre's Berlin studies was the philosophical novel Nausea, published in France in 1938, widely popular, and a carrier of Heidegger's nothingness. Sartre's greatest philosophic work, the massive Being and Nothingness, written and published in Nazi-occupied France, is enormously indebted thematically to Heidegger's Being and Time. Safranski reproaches Being and Nothingness for developing "an entire philosophy of anti-totahtan- anism" (a word that has not previously appeared in Safranski's biography, nor IS its meaning clarified in this passage.) In his attempt to shield Heidegger from totalitarianism, Safranski does not see the ironic outcome of existential phenomenologies which proclaim both human freedom and the nothingness of being: to fill the moral and pohtlcal void, Heidegger identified with Nazi totalitarianism; and Sartre, after years of relent- less pressure, cleared a path to the totalitarianism of the Communist Party of France.

Differences between Sartre and Heidegger erupted in the immediate post-war situation with Sartre's famous lecture, "Existentialism is a Humanism," delivered on October 29, 1945. Wildly celebrated in hberated France as the champion of freedom, Sartre's existen-

tialism was feared both by the Catholic Church and the French Communist Party and charged with promoting a philosophy devoid of moral values. Safranski describes the huge, boisterous Parisian crowd that packed the Club Maintenant to hear Sartre's defense "in the expecta- tion that the existentialist encychcal would be proclaimed that evening .... " and that they were hearing sentences that would be quoted forever thereafter. Safranski goes on to spoof Sartre as a "cult figure" gaining popular appeal with "catchy" phrases.

Sartre soon dismisses his legendary lecture as a "mistake" and repudiates his effort to find an ethics for existentiahsm in humanism. By the early 1950s he will have revealed the ethics of "'deliverance and salvation," which he had hinted at darkly in Being and Nothingness and which could be "achieved only after a radical conversion." It IS the ethics of communist totalitarianism to which Sartre found himself a reluctant convert.

Heldegger's reply to Sartre, "On Hu- manism," was written in 1946 while en- during the disgrace of removal from the universxty, a scant impoverished life, and in the spring, a brief physical and mental breakdown. Safranski acknowledges that "On Humanism" "must seem inept" as a reply to the issues raised by Sartre. "But," as opening up ... "certain problems of life ... the work is a magnificent and highly effective document."

In the essay "On Humanism," Heldegger has made his famous Kehre, his turn to Being and away from his failed pursuit of truth through Dasein in Being and Time. With the turn to Being, he will sweep aside the h)story of philosophy since the early Greeks, and the whole of modern philosophies of science and politics for having "forgotten" Be- ing and reducing Being to the significance of beings. Late in his philosophizing, Heidegger turns to language and the view that language is the house of Be- rag. Yet only in the mystical, numinous language spoken by Holderlin and the German poets of crisis does Being come into the light. And in the fulfillment of his philosophic odyssey He~degger's counsel to the 20" century is a dimly mystical hopeless resignation to the

domination of technology, inauthentlcity, superficiality of everyday life, American- ization, and the forgotteness of Being.

In 1966, he consents to be interviewed by Der Spiegel on condition that it be published posthumously. The editor's questioning was delicately apologetic out of fear of the "famous thinker," espe- cially m reference to his rector's address, his behavior toward Husserl, and his dismissal from the universi ty by the denazification proceedings. Heidegger responds that he had always been apo- litical and that he had accepted the rec- torate reluctantly in order to prevent the Nazi functionaries from seizing control of the University. He does not tell them, Safranski notes, that he had been gripped by an intoxicating power of Identifica- tion with the Nazi movement, that he had become an informer to protect the pu- rity of the Nazi revolution, and that he came into conflict with the Nazi authorities because he wished to move the revolution forward. To a question about the future of technology, Heidegger replies: "How can a political system accommo- date itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy. Only a god can save us."

The effect of the interview was to stir up the argument about Heidegger's Nazi involvement, rather than bring it to an end. "But," asks Safranski belligerently, "Was Heidegger to accept shared respon- sibihty for the monstrous crimes of Na- zism in which he had genuinely played no part ... Heidegger had never been a racist." Has Safranski "forgotten" h~s own muddled and contrived answers to his question, "Was Heidegger an anti- Semite?"

In response to the appeal from Herbert Marcuse, his disciple and former student, to provide a word that would clear Heidegger from Nazi identification and publicly acknowledge his transformation, Heidegger replied that he has already performed this transformation in his lectures. Safranski: "That he should on public demand, distance himself from the murder of millions of Jews--that Heidegger rightly regards as monstrous. To do so implies that the

86 / SOCIETY �9 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999

public considered him capable of com- plicity with the murder." Heidegger is forgivable, if not forgiven.

Heidegger died on May 26, 1976, at Messkirch. A church service and burial in the Messkirch cemetery followed as he had requested. His philosophic jour- ney from the call of Dasein to terror and to the call of Being to resignation had reached its end.

Safranski concludes his biography by quoting Heidegger upon the death of philosopher Scheler: "Yet one more way of doing philosophy sinks into the darkness." Not so. Heidegger's philosophic voice is heard in the great waves of existentialism which swept much of the Western world and remain powerful in American universities and in the public domain; in the Dasein themes of anxi- ety, freedom, and inauthenticity in nov- els, biography and poetry; in the rise of existential psychiatry; in the professional scholarship of Heideggerian philosophers; and in the endless ponderings, such as Safranski's, of the scandal of Heidegger's philosophy.

Safranski offers a fantasy theory in which the coincidence of Heidegger's philosophic demand for terror and the Nazi seizure of power leads Heidegger to dream that he himself is the "spur" to change and terror, and that the Nazi revolution is his own metaphysical revolution never to be surrendered. Safranski's fantasy theory is designed to make Heidegger's involvement with Nazism humanly and philosophically under- standable, rather than morally reprehen- sible. His Heidegger is not irredeemably evil, yet not redeemably good and in this sense, "between good and evil," as in the book's provocative subtitle. Safransks fantasy theory serves the additional purpose of refuting arguments (such as that of Richard Rorty) which defend Heidegger's philosophy by separating it from his admittedly bad character. Safranski's fantasy theory shows that it is He~degger's own philosophy's call for terror that draws him to identify with Naza terror.

Safranski's intellectual and personal idennfication with Heidegger's philosophy renders him exqmsitely sensitive to Heidegger's themes and moods in Be-

ing and Time, and uncritically oblivious to the realities of history, politics, and science which expose its narrow extrem- ism. Nowhere does Safranski recognize the historical reality of Heidegger's roots in the long German cultural and philosophic heritage of opposition to the West- ern liberal and scientific tradition, from the 19 ~ century Romantic poets' defiance of reason, to Fichte's "Addresses to the German People" proclaiming the Ger- mans as the ur-volk rooted in their soil and blood and destined by their will to the spiritual and political leadership of Europe. Heidegger's philosophy is a renewal of these themes in the context of Nazism and its strategies for the domination of Germany and the West. Safranski takes no note of the remark- able agreement between Heidegger and Hitler, both drinking from the same in- herited cultural, philosophic well.

Safranski remains oblivious also to the inadequacy of a philosophy that turns its back on the real world of nature in which we live, and demonizes the achievements made by scientific knowledge of the natural world and by the revo- lutions of the modern world on behalf of human freedom and democratic gov- ernance. Nor does the reality of the social world appear in Heidegger's philosophy or in Safranski's retelling. We learn nothing of the social and political conditions of Germany in the era of the World Wars, or of the ill-fated Weimar Republic's experiment in democracy. We do not hear the oracular voice of Hitler electrifying the volk, as his seizure of power had electrified Heidegger, and with the same "soil and blood of the homeland" appeal. We do not hear the eerie sounds of the trains chugging toward the concentration camps. In the pursuit of a philosophy of Being and nothingness, the world is lost--to terror, or hopeless resignation.

Thelma Z. Lavine is Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Philosophy and American Culture at George Mason Uni- versity. She is the author of a nationally televised PBS course in philosophy, the author of From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest, and co-author and co-editor of History and Anti-History in Philosophy.

Social Science

Books of the Month

In every issue the editors of Soci- ety present a sampling of the best new books received. They are se- lected on the basis of significant coverage of social science problems and concerns as well as writing style and presentation that appeal to a broad reading public.

Steven C. Dubin. Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. NewYork: New York University Press, 1999. $24.95.

Paul Kahn. The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstruct ing Legal Scholarship. Chicago:The Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1999. $27.50.

Everett Carll Ladd. The Ladd Re- port. New York: The Free Press/ Macmillan, 1999. $25.00.

Norman Levitt. Prometheus Be- deviled: Science and the Contra- dict ions of Contemporary Culture. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1999. $32.00.

David Patterson. Along the Edge of Annihilation:The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary. Seattle and London: Univer- sity of Washington Press, 1999. $19.95.

Robert Weissberg. The Politics of Empowerment. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999. $45.00.


Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

By Marion A. Kaplan. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998. 290pp. $30.00

Reviewed by Walter Laqueur

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 the German Jews became pariahs in the country which they and their an- cestors had considered home. But this happened gradually, not at once and seen in retrospect this was part of their trag- edy, the reason why more had not tried to escape while it was still possible. True, no country wanted them and most had closed their doors almost hermetically but there were still some far away exotic places, of which little, if anything, was known, except the fact that their consuls in Berlin could be persuaded for a con- sideration to issue papers which might, or might not, be considered valid visas. When the Nazis entered Austria there was no gradualism as far as the persecu- tions and the ghettoization were concerned and this explains why relatively more people left Austria in five months than Germany in five years.

Anti-Jewish legislation was intro- duced early in 1933. Jews were dismissed from all positions in the state and local administration (including schools, universities, hospitals and so on), they could not longer perform in the arts, they were gradually expropriated, their shops and businesses were boycotted and they were forced to sell, often at a nominal price. But in the beginning certain ex- ceptions were made, for instance with regard to those who had served as sol- diers in World War One and their fami- lies or citizens of foreign countries. Hence the early illusions, not only among the German patriots among them, but also among the orthodox believers who had always thought that the Jews should stick to their own kind, and their own culture. There was the hope that the worst was already behind them, that there would be room for a small Jewish community in the Third Reich keeping a very low pro- file and that there was no particular ur- gency to emigrate. "Adjustment" was one of the key words in those years.

Gradually the noose tightened and after the Olympic Games of 1936 the situation rapidly deteriorated. The turning point was Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, a night of anti-Jewish rioting and terrorism) in November 1938, however, even then it was by no means clear that Auschwitz would be at the end of the road. For more than six years after the Nazis came to power there was something like Jewish communal social and cultural life in Germany and Professor Kaplan who teaches history at Queen's College, New York investigated how this functioned at the grassroots level in her important study. This has seldom been done before and it is also true that, as the author claims, the existing accounts were mostly written from a man's point of view dealing with politics, in which few women were active.

As the men were squeezed out of their professions and as their incomes shrank along with their self-confidence, women took on male roles. They kept the family together, oversaw the education of the children, took care of the physical com- forts of all in conditions infinitely worse than in earlier years. They provided psychological support, became the pillar on which the family rested and took vital decisions which earlier on had been a male preserve They also saw (Ms. Kaplan believes) the warning signs earlier than the menfolk and they were push- ing their famdies to emigrate at a time when the men still hesitated. Thxs is the overall picture emerging from this interesting book which makes no secret of its point of view: It is women's history, the great majority of the unpublished memoirs from which the author derives her knowledge, were written by women in later years; this selective approach is both this p ionee r ing b o o k ' s great strength but also its basic weakness, because, by necessity, it narrows its focus. As Prof. Kaplan sees it, gender was a

very important fact in the holocaust and at times it was of critical significance.

Unlike some of her radical colleagues the author does not maintain that Jewish women were doubly oppressed, as members of an inferior race and in wew of their gender. This would be difficult to maintain anyway in the case of Germany where up to the deportations in 1942-43 Jewish women in many respects fared better than men. They were not physi- cally assaulted in the streets and Nazi propaganda almost always focused on men. Women were hardly ever arrested except if they had engaged prominently in anti-Nazi political activities. Tens of thousand of men were sent to concentration camps after Crystal Night, but not a single Jewish woman. The laws for the protection of the Aryan race which made sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews a criminal offense were virtu- ally never used against Jewish women, and whereas thousands of male homo- sexuals were arrested or sent to concentration camps, lesbianism was not a criminal offense in German law, even though a handful might have been de- tained as "asocial elements."

All this is not to say that the Nazis somehow had a weakness for Jewish women or that they behaved gentle- manly-- they were misogynists by deep conviction. It simply meant that a taboo was in force which in peacetime would not be broken. On occasion this contin- ued even during the war. There was the famous protest in Berlin in 1943 when Christian women successfully demon- strated against the arrest of their Jewish spouses. Had this spontaneous protest been staged by men rather than women, the Gestapo would have made short shrift of them. It was also easier for a woman to hide during the war simply because men of military age were usually in uni- form and those who were not immedi- ately attracted attention. As for the final destiny of Jewish men and women, there was of course not the slightest difference as far as the Nazis were concerned, they were all to be exterminated.

Prof. Kaplan maintains that women were more inclined to emigrate and she also g~ves the reasons: Women, she thinks, had less to lose, they were less

88 / SOCIETY �9 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999

involved in the economy, less integrated in the public world, less patriotically German, felt less at home with German culture but on the other hand had better social antennae for what was happening around them. This is an interesting theory but it does not correspond with what I recall and what my surviving contem- poraries tell me. There were women-- as Prof. Kaplan describes them, the un- sung heroes of the years of oppression--who took over positions of leadership for which they had never been prepared. But there were also others who collapsed into despair, lethargy and quite often into psychosomatic disease.

Prof. Kaplan would have been on safer ground had she claimed that among those who emigrated, women quite often became the head of the family in their country of absorption because they showed more initiative and would find work more easily and became during the first years the main breadwinners. But as far as the decision to emigrate was concerned there is no real evidence that there was a significant difference between the behavior of men and women. This decision depended far more on age, on connections with family or friends abroad and other such considerations. It depended last not least on the financial situation of the family. Ostjuden, Jews who had come to Germany from the East during the previous decade or two were more suspicious of authority than Ger- man Jews who had been educated to be good citizens, they were less deeply rooted and therefore more mobile.

Prof. Kaplan is thought-provoking when she writes about women's perspectives, attitudes and feelings even when she reaches doubtful conclusions. But it should always be born in mind that those she writes about were "our crowd," the very assimilated secular, non-Zionist, middle class women who joined the League of Jewish Women but seldom attended synagogue services. Many, perhaps a majority, did not belong to these categories, there were Orthodox Jews or working class Jews, and many thousands who had come to Germany just before or after the First World War. Most of them did not read Rilke or play the piano since they had not been to finishing school

and they did not write memoirs in later years. About them we know little for, as the proverbial old textbook for young historians states, "No sources, no history."

This is one of the great difficulties facing historians who want to write on daily life and the grassroots. On some topics he (or she) will face an abundance of source material, and since he (or she) is bound to have an ideological agenda of sorts there is the great temptation to find precisely what one is looking for, the con- firmation of one's preconceived notions. On the school I attended in Germany after 1933 I must have read at least half a dozen such memoirs in recent years. On some topics, the historian--as hard as he (or she) will try--may find little or nothing. As the street singer in the final scene of the Three Penny Opera sagely put it: "And you see the ones in brightness. Those in darkness drop from sight."

Those interested in certain aspects of the life of German Jewry under the Na- zis will find Prof. Kaplan's book of considerable interest. But it is only fair to add that there is a huge literature on the

subject, above all the very substantial yearbooks of the Leo Baeck Institute published since 1956. Together with the many monographs published by the Leo Baeck Institute which has branches in New York, London and Jerusalem, they constitute a unique body of information. Another very recent important source is the massive two volume Toldot ha'shoah, Germania (History of the Shoah, Ger- many), edited by Avraham Margaliot and Yehoyahim Cochavi, Yad vashem, Jerusalem, 1998. This study has detailed sections about the economic situation of the Jews in Germany, Jewish education, the situation of Orthodox Jews, manifes- tations of resistance and other topics.

Walter Laqueur is chairman of the In- ternational Research Council of the Cen- ter for Strategic and International Stud- ies in Washington D. C. His books include Guerrilla Warfare, Fin de Sibcle and Other Essays on Europe and America, and The Uses and Limits of Intelligence, all avail- able from Transaction. Reprinted from The Los Angeles Times.

Democracy and Technology By Richard E. Sclove. New York & London: The Guilford Press, 1995, 338 pp.

But Is It True?: A Citizen's Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues

By Aaron Wildavsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 704 pp.

Reviewed by Jerome R. Ravetz

Although dealing with different problems, these two very substantial books form an instructive complemen- tary pair. First, their differences. The author of Democracy and Technology, Richard Sclove, is a young man on the Left, optimistically imagining a future democratic technology. The author of But Is It True?, the late Aaron Wildavsky, was a mature man on the Right, pessimistically reviewing the failures of past regulatory science. Sclove sketches how things could go very well; Wildavsky (with his collabo- rators) analyzes in great detail how

things have gone very badly wrong. Sclove offers few prescriptions other than the application of good will and common sense; Wildavsky provides a detailed methodological canon for the assessment of spurious claims of danger. For Sclove, there are really very few deep diff icult ies in view; for Wildavsky, the prospects are dim for any competent debate on the issues he discusses. So while their subject matters do not overlap at all, they provide examples of two contrasting styles of argument and thought in relation to the general issues of "science" in the mod-

90 / S O C I E T Y �9 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1999

ern world. I should say at the outset that I find Sclove's book, in spite of some marked limitations, to be valuable and successful in its own terms, while Wildavskry's is less so; and I hope that this assessment is not dependent on my having more sympathy for the former book.

The differences extend to the struc- ture of their narratives. Democracy and Technology is a sustained argument to a thesis. It starts with explanations of both "technology" and "democracy" as he will deploy them; it proceeds through "design criteria for democratic tech- nologies," and it concludes with a vision "towards a democratic politics of technology." He has a unified conception of democracy in community, work, and politics; and he shows how the choice and operation of technology is inevitably, in part at least, a political act. The argument has a good momentum, in its explanations, citations of examples and sources, and dialogue with criticisms. By contrast, But Is It True? consists of a set of separate essays on particular cases, done by various asso- ciates, some in col laborat ion with Wildavsky, with three final essays of synthesis, which deal with citizenship, detecting errors, and rejecting the pre- cautionary principle. As a tome it is more weighty, and it presents itself as an unbiased analysis.

Along with these structural differences, there are deep similarities in the approaches of the two books, which are equally illuminating. Both are examples of a genre we might call "advocacy scholarship." That is, while each in its own way fulfils the criteria for serious intellectual work, they are (one explicitly, the other not) making a case for a particular thesis with political im- plications. What each author takes for granted as unproblematic locates him on the pol i t ical spec t rum. For Wildavsky, the assumption is clear: industry is the background beneficial force, which needs only to be allowed to do its work for the general good, and which is only hampered in that en- deavor by costly (and frequently coun- terproductive) regulations. The case studies fit with this prejudgment: thus the study of asbestos focuses on prob-

lems of removal, and it does not mention workplace asbestos, which was previously known secretly for a long time by Johns Manville to be killing its work- ers, and was then exposed in a classic compensation case. That well known scandal would seem to be relevant, for explaining the subsequent panic over asbestos in public buildings; but for the account in this book the earlier episode did not exist. Also, there is hardly a mention of tobacco and the tobacco industry. So while the detailed case studies are well argued, a reader not already persuaded of the book's general thesis could observe the one-sided selection of examples and infer an equal bias in content as well.

The book on democratic technology has its own tactful silences; thus there is no discussion of the hard, indeed bit- ter lessons of recent attempted democratic reforms of basic social institu- tions, outside of the narrowly political domain. One clue to the absence of serious engagement with such problems (which are both deep and practical) is in Sclove's initial selection of examples demonstrating his thesis. He contrasts some villagers In Spain, who lost their communal ways and values when they got piped water, to the Old Order Amish, who manage to fine tune their adjustment to modern technology while preserving both their cultural integrity and their material prosperity. Although he remarks on the "smallness and cultural homogeneity" of the Amish, this does not adequately convey the profun- dity of their difference from the sur- rounding modern culture. So both stories can be seen as s impl i f ied, romanticized versions of complex processes of cultural adaptation to new technology, on which there happens to be a considerable scholarly literature. Of course, his basic point, that technology affects our lives, and is neither au- tomatic nor inevitable, is correct and powerful. He might have started with the observation that technology is now very largely independent of any democratic control whatever, thereby remind- ing us at the outset of the enormity and importance of the task, analogous to the historic struggles for the abolition of

slavery, or for a universal franchise, or for trade union rights. But instead he chose these parables, which make it all sound rather easy.

Of course, the line between "advocacy scholarship" and the other sort is not easy to define, and some of the most fruitful productions in many scholarly fields have been framed as advocacy. But there is a difference between arguments which fail to give adequate treat- ment to internal inconsistencies and external criticisms (after all, any scholar can lay that charge on any other) and those where the management of contra- riety becomes conspicuous by its absence. Again, the damage done to an argument by this style will depend strongly on its purpose and audience. Democracy and Technology is a pioneering work, articulating a particular vision and handling the expected ob- jections to it. Its arguments proceed logically and are quite compelling in their own terms; and In the extended endnotes there is a lively theoretical dialogue. Were this review to be published in a journal devoted to intormed action rather than to reflective scholarship, I might well produce praise of the sort that is given by a half-dozen no- table persons on the back cover. But to the extent that the author wishes to be taken seriously in a debate, he must sub- mit to assessment by these criteria as well.

In spite of its greater bulk and elabo- rate scholarly apparatus, But Is It True ? exhibits analogous limitations, but to an even greater degree. First, let me make it clear that this is not one of those stri- dent works which denounces all the regulators as stupid or malevolent or both; there is an enormous amount of good narrative, and good sense, in its various essays. Its partisan character shows in more subtle ways, alongside those of selection that I mentioned above.

First and foremost, the title itself implies that there is a simple truth about environmental risks. Sometimes there is indeed truth, or a judgment that is so reliable as to be effectively true. One such is that high concentrations of acid or soot in the atmosphere are bad for


human respiratory systems (this early environmental hazard is not mentioned in the book). On other issues, judg- ments are more or less debatable at any given time, and with a changeable con- sensus over time. Thus a debate extend- ing over decades, based on reinterpre- tations of Hiroshima data, has rewsed downward the "threshold" for radiation damage (also not discussed here).

But it is only rarely that unanimity can be quickly achieved in the assessment of environmental risk problems, in which uncertainty, value-conflict, emotional loading, power-politics and the need for rapid policy decisions are an essential part of the problem. It would be astonishing if, particularly in the fractious atmosphere of American policy debates, mistakes were never made by the regulators, some of which in retrospect were defensible and some not. But "is it true?" is a question that is more relevant for classic research scientific practice than for policy debate in this essentially contested area. Even there, philosophers of science have recognized for the past century that "truth" is neither simple nor always the most appropriate organizing concept.

The theoretical core of the book ~s in the penultimate chapter, which in- cludes a very perceptive and useful guide to testing environmental and safety studies. But it assumes a context that is as sanitized in its own way as that presupposed by Sclove for his vision. The checklist displays a profound ignorance of what such debates are about, assuming that the arguments are disinterested inquiries into a state of nature, rather than advocacy for a cause. The criteria of quality implied here are all "internal," ignoring the rel- evance of policy to the assessment of testimony, and also ignoring the importance of the affiliations of scientists. Maintaining the integrity of research m the policy-related fields is, as is well known, a delicate and difficult task. But to ignore the policy dimension alto- gether, as Wildavsky does, is to display a naivete so deep as to seem dehberate.

Wildavsky 's concluding chapter contains a revealing and respectful dialogue with Steven Schneider, a distln-

gulshed environmental scientist who is both committed and reflective. At the outset Wlldavsky announces himself as a "political activist since teenage years,'" and therefore he does not criticize Schneider for engaging in politics. He only disagrees with his view of r~sk. Also, he quotes a passage now infa- mous, distinguishing between the roles of scientist and of concerned human being, where Schneider concludes "Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Wildavsky treats this as a serious position, making the reasoned criticism, "If everyone is trying to counter someone else's comments, it will not be possible to figure out even approximately where the truth, insofar as it is known, lies." Here ~s a great lost opportunity, where Wildavsky the lntel- hgent conservative might have engaged with Schneider's dilemma, but did not.

This failure is worth analyzing. First, debate among scientists has been recognized by philosophers of science from Popper and Lakatos onwards (not to mention Feyerabend) as having just this character, of mutual criticism, which Wildavsky decries. Further, in a scientific debate where policy ~ssues are at stake the participants may (but need not) each have an "interest," occupa- tional or political. In this forensic context they may abjure the norm of "dis- interestedness" articulated by Robert K. Merton for academic science. Problems arise when there is confusion (among participants, spectators, or even scientists themselves) over which role, and which norms, they are adopting.

Moreover, a scientific debate driven by policy Issues will inevitably share the style of other policy debates, with ten- dencies to such undesirable but inevitable fea tures as par t i sanship , trivmallzatlon, media hype, and dirty tricks. This is what Schneider saw as a dilemma. Wlldavsky totally missed this in h~s theoretical reflections, m spite of having displayed many such procedural defects m his descriptive studies. Of course, to conduct high-level scientific debates under such circumstances is very difficult indeed, and it is not surprising that many of them go badly. But

Wildavsky seems not to know the difference between the decision processes of American politics and refereeing pro- cedures of the Royal Society of Lon- don. His model of truth-searching in this context is positively misleading, perhaps for himself as much as for his readers.

Wildavsky shows an implicit awareness that the issue at stake in a policy debate is not what is "true," but what should be done--soon, or now. On this, there must be some principles and prac- tices of assignment of burden of proof; and Wildavsky's thesis throughout the book is that in America the burden of proof has been totally biased in favor of precaution at all costs. Again, rather than recognizing (as some of his essay- ists do) that the assignment of burden of proof is itself both highly fraught and highly political, he concludes the book with a simple prescription: "Regulate only if there is a probability of harm," and do not do so if there is just a mere possibility.

He did not live to see one important consequence of this prescription: m the "Mad Cow Disease" epidemic m Brit- ish cattle. The epidemic resulted from a history of ministerial complacency co- terminous with then-incumbent Conser- vative government, and started with an act of deregulation. At the time of this writing, the only incontrovertible truths to be had about the human risks of"Mad Cow Disease" are that there have been more than a dozen cases of a new and similar disease among younger people, reported only in Britain; and that consumers" trust in beef throughout Europe, and public trust in government science in Britain, are both dangerously low.

The real pity is that Wildavsky could not, at the end, rise above his more recent activist commitments; and so his keen intellect was not deployed in the urgent debate on quality-control in pohcy-relevant science. There is indeed a risk of a "Gresham's Law" coming into operation in this branch of science, with "junk science" becoming the norm. My own work on quality in science, starting with Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Transaction Publishers, 1995), has led me to the

92 / SOCIETY , S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1999

conception of "post-normal science," where, typically, facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. In such cases, the new requirements for quality assurance re- quires the expansion of the peer community to include all participants; this would result in the democratization of the process of policy making. (See S.O. Funtowicz and J.R. Ravetz, "Science for the Post-Normal Age," Futures 25/7, 1993). There is a need for debate on these ideas, from all perspectives. But it will not help anyone to grapple with these new and critical problems of scientific method, by supposing that the story is simply one of hysterical envi- ronmentalists impeding beneficent industry through distorting the plain scientific truth about risks.

In all fairness, strictures of a similar sort could be made about Sclove, although he too demonstrates complete competence with his chosen materials. Wherever he analyzes an issue, he shows a command of the relevant literature and an appreciation of all the relevant arguments. Also, there is no doubt of his awareness of the way that entrenched corporate power structures maintain their grip over workforces, consumers, and whole regions of the world. But there is a peculiarly bland quality about his analyses and recommendations. Let one example suffice: the section on transnational corporations starts with a question, "Are certain forms of corporate enterprise (notably, large transnationals, international banks, and giant investment firms) structurally resistant to democratization...? How can one identify such corporate forms and seek their devolu- tion toward democratically manageable alternatives? A first step might be to establish a popularly based international study commission, perhaps organized as a satellite-televised citizen tribunal." This is quite reasonable in its way, but it cannot be a substitute for a recogni- tion of the power and of the predatory aspects of the behavior of such institu- tions, and of their propensity to use all means in their self-defense.

I could imagine the reaction of some typical readers, to such a suggestion for

a "study commission." To a preppie freshman at Amherst, it might seem dangerously radical. To a Third-World NGO activist, it might seem a joke. This raises the question, who is the intended audience for Sclove's message? For Wildavsky's message, the answer is clear: those who need support in their struggle against environmental activists and their sympathetic bureaucracies. But just who is Sclove trying to influence and arouse? A vision of a smooth transition to democracy in technology would certainly not offend comfortable liberal opinion; but it is hardly likely to appeal to people struggling at the pol- luted grass roots. I am not objecting to his choice of audience and of the corresponding universe of assumptions; wherever we locate ourselves on an issue, we will seem sectarian to some and opportunist to others. Nor am I recom- mending that Sclove adopt a radical rhetoric. Rather, I have a sense of unease, for he shows no sense of the depth of these problems, in practical, historical and theoretical terms. This means that in spite of its many sterling quali- ties, the book exists only at the level of its argument. I find there no resonances by which it will inform a lasting and effective commitment through the ma- turing of its intended policy consequences.

It could be that I am here expressing my own prejudices as an adopted Eu- ropean; as Alistair Cooke said recently, quoting someone else, "America is an irony-free zone." But I am keenly aware of living at the end of a century in which some of the noblest aspirations of soci- etal reform and innovation have ended in corruption, perversion, or disintegra- tion. Now, in this book a highly motivated and very persuasive young man comes along and talks about the vast project of democratizing technology as if all it needed were good arguments and good will. I cannot help asking, where are the interests that will promote th~s admirable reform as something good for themselves? What are the latent con- tradictions within this program? Where should we expect debate, disagreement and even splits within the nascent movement for democratizing technology; and

what sorts of counterattacks will be mounted by those interests which feel threatened by democratization? This is not to be gloomy about the prospects, but merely to draw on the familiar recent experience of coalition politics in America, and of diversified social movements like feminism. If Sclove had presented his recommendations in some sort of historical context, perhaps as modest innovations at first, but with the potential for contributing to an even- tual transformation of the dominant power relations in technology, I would have been more enthusiastic. There is a paradox here which is not easy to resolve, that someone who argues a case so well at one level, should seem so oblivious to the problems at the next deeper level.

My sense of unease with Sclove's book is not so much that such considerations are absent from his text; for it is a pioneering work and needs to accentu- ate the positive. But I cannot even imagine another chapter in a second edition, which deals with these issues; the whole tone of the book excludes reflections of this sort. In this sense, it is a well argued clarion call rather than a foundation for reasoned long-term action. It is not a criticism to say that it is located in a tradition of "Utopian" social reformers, rather like Bellamy's Looking Backward of a hundred years ago. After all, in hind- sight their record can stand comparison with that of the "scientific socialists" who considered themselves so superior. But I can only hope that among Sclove's activists there is no one whose experience of the cause of democratizing technology eventually makes him as disillu- sioned and embittered as the late Aaron Wildavsky became.

Jerome R. Ravetz works as an independent consultant in London. His seminal work, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, was recently republished by Transaction. His se- lected essays were published as The Merger of Knowledge with Power. His most recent work has been on scientific uncertainty, with Silvio Funtowicz, was published as Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy.


The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability By Arthur R. Jensen. Westport , CT: Praeger, 648 pp., 1998, $39.95

Reviewed by Kevin L a m b

Contemporary research findings from IQ studies often reflect a paradox in the process of scientific discovery. The multitude of volumes that exist on the subject yield in many ways frag- mented re su l t s - - tha t is until now. Arthur R. Jensen's latest work, his sev- enth book among 400 publications, is an unparalleled analysis of what was essentially discovered nearly a century ago: the general factor of mental ability. In compiling an impressive body of analytical and experimental research over the years, Jensen has pursued Karl Popper's dictum that "in matters of the intellect, the only things worth striving for are true theories, or theories which come nearer the truth."

The fact that the most comprehensive study of general intelligence by one of the leading authorities on IQ has received little if any news coverage isn't too surprising, though in some ways It

is quite revealing. The publicanon of Richard Herrns te in and Char les Murray's The Bell Curve in the fall of 1994 generated headlines unlike any other recent work of nonfiction. As a perpetual motion machine, The Bell Curve spawned an ongoing cottage industry of commentary and published critiques, including several books that have tried to undermine its central thesis: the significance of individual differences in mental ability. For a major publisher to release an impressive work of this kind signaled a colossal depar- ture in the publishing world.

The focus of The g Factor is an un- precedented probe of the more refined scientific areas that form the foundanon of The Bell Curve. Whereas the later provoked a great deal of criticism over social policy reforms, the former excludes policy recommendations alto- gether. Cover to cover, The g Factor is a meticulous review of the nature, causes and practical consequences of variations in human general intelligence. To the extent that The Bell Curve

sketched out a detailed case for individual and group differences in IQ, The g Factor fills in the fine print rather impressively. From its historical incep- tion to recent advancements within several academic fields, Jensen provides an impressive analysis of the evidence to date for general mental ability. Experts and laymen alike would be hard pressed not to conclude that The g Factor, like Jensen's previous book Bias in Mental Testing, is a landmark study.

By noticing a common pattern m mental activity, the late British psychological p ioneer Char les Edward Spearman discovered the concept of general mental ability, which he labeled g. Ini t ia l ly publ i shed in 1904, Spearman's findings formed the basis of his classic 1927 book The Abtlittes of Man. A number of rival theories have attempted to challenge the concept of general intelligence ever since. Jensen devotes considerable space to these miscellaneous claims and why they don't measure up. For example, one of the more popular alternative theories to g, Howard Gardner's theory of mulnple intelligences, collapses with relative ease. Gardner's theory lacks empirical corroboration in that it fails to substan- tiate how seven distinct abilities exist independently from g.

Since Spearman's pioneering work, a number of converging developments m the behavioral sciences--improvements in statisncal analysis, advances in behavioral genetics, technological neuroscience breakthroughs, and experimental innovations in psychological research--provide a greater under- standing of the factors that determine individual differences in mental abihty.

Recent findings m behavioral genetics reveal how nature and nurture influence the development of g over the course of an individual's hfespan. Re- searchers have been able to isolate the significance of shared versus nonshared enwronments from well-developed,

longitudinal twin, sibling and adoption studies. One insightful result challenges the prevailing view about the long-term enrichment of a home environment. Among siblings, the hentability of general intelligence actually increases with age whereas the shared (between-family) environmental contnbunon nearly vanishes over time. Only 20 percent of the total difference in adult sibling IQs constitutes the nonshared influence of the within-family environment. Jensen notes that "these surprising results are among the most striking and strongly substantiated findings of behavioral genetics in recent years."

One interesting trend in IQ research is the secular rise in IQ scores. The "Flynn Effect,' named after political scientist James Flynn, has stirred a great deal of interest in what seems to be a steady rise in IQ levels over several decades. Much of what is known about this phenomenon, as Jensen points out, remains in dispute. It raises questions over the role of nutrition, advances in health care, early intervention pro- grams, level and type of abilities af- fected, and so on. Some scholars at- t r ibute the increase to dietary improvements over the years. A multitude of factors may produce changes in a phenotypic trait such as mental ability. Whether or not this rise actually reflects an increase in g has yet to be established.

A common misconception about mental ability is that "intelligence" simply reflects the narrow results of stan- dardized IQ tests. Cognlnve ablhty also Involves speed and inspection time of information processing. The g Factor provides a comprehensive survey of the results from chronomemc studies of intelligence, a specialized field of research m which Jensen is a pioneering contributor. In revisiting this area of abandoned research twenty years ago, Jensen devised a small console panel that contains a series of green lights, corresponding buttons and a home button on the panel's black surface. This device gauges in mi l l i seconds an individual's reaction time by raising a finger on the depressed home button and moving it to one of the panel's eight

94 / S O C I E T Y �9 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 1999

buttons as soon as its matching light is on. The experiment, one of several elementary cognit ive tasks (ECTs), records the reaction time of these finger movements--a composite of both decision time (DT) and movement (MT)-- in a sequence of 50 to 100 repeated trails. By increasing the level of difficulty in these ECTs, researchers like Jensen have been able to tease out the relationship between speed of cognitive activity and general mental ability.

Another major finding in IQ research over the years is the accumulated evidence of biological correlates of general intelligence. Physical characteris- tics such as head size, stature, brain size, rate of glucose metabolism in the brain, alpha brain wave frequencies, and myo- pia are well-established biological correlates of g. Some physical correlates, like brain and head size, represent in- trinsic causal relationships to general intelligence. Other physical traits like stature are basically extrinsic correlates, meaning there is no direct causal relationship between one trait, say height or weight, and another trait like IQ.

Jensen devotes considerable space to perhaps the single most controversial aspect of IQ research: the sources of population differences in mental ability. Thirty years ago, Jensen ignited a protracted controversy in the social sciences by arguing that the 15-point average black-white IQ gap reflected both genetic and environmental factors. One part of this argument that received a great deal of criticism was the relationship of individual (within-group) differences to racial (between-group) differences in IQ. In other words, the environmental and genetic factors responsible for producing individual differences hkewise account for ethnic differences in IQ. The reaction to Jensen's solicited paper in the Harvard Educa- tional Review (his 77th publication) generated widespread commentary and criticism.

While trying to get to the bottom of this unresolved yet fiercely contested thesis, Jensen noticed a pattern in the testing data that Spearman discovered nearly 70 years ago. Racial disparities in IQ scores generally reflect a differ-

ence in the g factor. The disparity is an actual measured difference in general mental ability rather than some artifact of the test itself. A careful review of the testing data indicates that the black- white IQ gap is consistently more pro- nounced on highly g-loaded IQ tests. Put simply, tests that measure g to a greater extent than any other single ability reveal persistently greater average differences.

The racial disparity in IQ scores is often assumed to be the result of a dis- advantaged environment. Since a higher percentage of black students are more likely to come from low-income urban households relative to their white suburban counterparts, this socio-economic condition is generally believed to be the source of IQ differences. Jensen provides substantial evidence that the test score disparity (a) is correlated with chronometric measures of mental activity and (b) exists independently of socio-economic status.

After thirty years of follow-up studies, including: an extensive review of the psychometric data, results of information processing experiments on hun- dreds of elementary school-age children, population differences in allelic frequencies, brain and other biological correlates of g, genetic distances between population groups, and the results of a longitudinal transracial adoption study, Jensen posits what he calls the default hypothesis.

In brief, the default hypothesis states that the proximal causes of both individual differences and population differences in heritable psychological traits are essentially the same, and are continuous variables. The population differences reflect differences in allele frequencies of the same genes that cause individual differences. Popula- tion differences also reflect environmental effects, as do individual differences, and these may differ in frequency between populations, as do allele frequencies. Hence, the real question is not whether population differences exist for a given polygenic trait, but rather the direction and mag- nitude of the difference.

To his credit, Jensen explains both the strengths and deficiencies of this default theory as well as the implausi- bility of rigid environmental interpretations. As Jensen cautiously notes, no single known factor (factor X) unique to any particular race causes this difference in mental ability. Combina- tions of genetic and environmental factors produce differences in mental traits that vary among individuals and overlap between ethnic groups. In trying to resolve some of these linger- ing issues, Jensen has put forth a de- finitive clarification of the underlying causes of racial differences in mental ability. The celebrated MIT scholar Steven Pinker points out in How The Mind Works that much of what had remained a mystery about the mind has been reduced to a set of resolv- able problems. Jensen's diligence in resolving one of the more treacher- ous issues in p s y c h o l o g i c a l research--the nature of human differences in mental abil i ty--may finally settle the critical aspects of this complex issue once and for all.

Kevin Lamb is the author of several articles that have appeared in National Review, Chronicles, The Social Con- tract, and The Journal of Social, Politi- cal & Economic Studies. He is a staff member of Newsweek's Washington bureau library. In collaboration with Chris Brand, he is currently research- ing a biography on William McDougall.

NOW SAVING F O R T H E I R F U T U R E Is

]CHILD'S PLAY. | Building your children's future just got easier, thanks II to the U.S. Treasury's new EasySaver Plan for U.S. II Saving Bonds. Sign up once and automatically

base U.S. Savings Bonds from your checking or savings account. EasySaver isasofeandeusywaytu E eF build their savings. ~ ' ~

1-877-811-7283 .~,,o,:~ i www.easysaver.gov ( ~

A p.bl. ' ~,er~lce of Ih[~ pubheatlq~tl

books in review

Documents