Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Aware that his proposal that they go in for social reform would shock fellow scientists, Dr. Lynd beat them to the punch. "The scholar-scientist," said he, "is in acute danger of being caught, in the words of one of [W. H.] Auden's poems, 'Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down...
...Muncie, Ind. and described in Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937). Since he wrote Middletown, Dr. Lynd has taught sociology at Columbia University and brooded on the fact that mankind, busily using the knowledge of natural scientists to make dangerous machines, remains in different to the knowledge of social scientists. Looking upon a chaotic world, Professor Lynd decided that it was a great tragedy that "men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss...
...hope to save men from the abyss by a big blueprint. He published a book with a startling title: Knowledge for What?* In it, Professor Lynd proposed that the U. S., having failed to get a plan from educators, preachers, politicians, businessmen or engineers, be brought to order by social scientists...
Professor Lynd does not pretend to have the blueprint in his own pocket, but he claims to know most of the questions and how to find the answers that would supply the blueprint's general plan. To start social scientists hunting for more meaningful answers, he proposed some "outrageous" working hypotheses. Samples...
...American people's faith in education as a cure-all is misplaced. Reasons: education is 1) an institutional straitjacket, 2) too slow. "This great faith in gradualness . . . assumes what may be called the haystack theory of social problems, that is, that our culture confronts a fixed quantum of problems which are being slowly carted away by 'progress,' each load reducing the total awaiting removal. Actually, however, the culture appears to be piling up problems faster than the slow horse-and-haywagon process of liberal change through education and reform is able to dispose of them...