Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, ma...sculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are--and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whos...e social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine whic...h has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... with every Asiatic country where we operate in cooperation with the existing culture, the need for intelligent understanding o...f that country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger--and it would be fatal to world peace--is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »