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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - XI. An American Dilemma - 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem - 10. America’s Opportunity
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Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads 1023
ment will become more and more determined by political decision and
public regulation. We are entering an era where fact-finding and scientific
theories of causal relations will be seen as instrumental in planning con-
trolled social change. The peace will bring nothing but problems, one
mounting upon another, and consequently, new urgent tasks for social
engineering. The American social scientist, because of the New Deal and
the War, is already acquiring familiarity with planning and practical action.
He will never again be given the opportunity to build up so ^^disinterested”
a social science.
The social sciences in America are equipped to meet the demands of the
post-war world. In social engineering they will retain the old American
faith in human beings which is all the time becoming fortified by research
as the trend continues toward environmentalism in the search for social
causation. In a sense, the social engineering of the coming epoch will be
nothing but the drawing of practical conclusions from the teaching of social
science that “human nature” is changeable and that human deficiencies and
unhappiness are. In large degree, preventable.
In this spirit, so intrinsically in harmony with the great tradition of the
Enlightenment and the American Revolution, the author may be allowed
to close with a personal note. Studying human beings and their behavior
is not discouraging. When the author recalls the long gallery of persons
whom, in the course of this inquiry, he has come to know with the impetu-
ous but temporary intimacy of the stranger—sharecroppers and plantation
owners, workers and employers, merchants and bankers, intellectuals,
preachers, organization leaders, political bosses, gangsters, black and white,
men and women, young and old. Southerners and Northerners—the general
observation retained is the following: Behind all outward dissimilarities,
behind their contradictory valuations, rationalizations, vested interests,
group allegiances and animosities, behind fears and defense constructions,
behind the role they play in life and the mask they wear, people are all
much alike on a fundamental level. And they are all good people. They
want to be rational and just. They all plead to their conscience that they
meant well even when things went wrong.
Social study is concerned with explaining why all these potentially and
intentionally good people so often make life a hell for themselves and
each other when they live together, whether in a family, a community,
a nation or a world. The fault is certainly not with becoming organized
fer se. In their formal organizations, as we have seen, people invest their
highest ideals. These institutions regularly direct the individual toward
more cooperation and justice than he would be inclined to observe as an
isolated private person. The fault Is, rather, that our structures of organ-
izations are too imperfect, each by itself, and badly integrated into a social
whole.
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