Gloomy Debate

FAITH, REASON AND CIVILIZATION -- Harold J. Laski-- Viking ($2.50). OMNIPOTENT GOVERNMENT, THE RISE OF THE TOTAL STATE AND TOTAL WAR -- Ludwig von Mises -- Yale ($3.75). In their most recent books, Harold Laski and Ludwig von Mises write about the same world crisis. But a Zulu savage, should he be miraculously endowed with the ability to comprehend fairly complicated English, would hardly recognize it as the same. To Laski, the British socialist, the breakdown has been caused by a century of unbridled economic individualism and the cure is the traditional Marxist specific: let government take over the means of production. To Mises, the Austrian free-trade economist now exiled in the U.S., the evil that afflicts the world has one origin everywhere: too much government intervention in men's livelihoods. To Mises, Laski's way of thinking is mumbo jumbo, utterly divorced from reality. To Laski, Mises' ideas are about as useful as a stone hatchet. Soviet Heaven? Laski's book is a jeweled affair, packed with all the learned rag, tag, and bobtail that has become embedded in a remarkably assimilative mind. The Laski argument is developed in sweeping assertions. The world has suffered a breakdown in values. It is hungering for a new religion. But traditional Christianity will no longer fill the bill, for modern man is not willing to wait for pie in the sky. The new heaven must be an earthly one; the new priests must be secular. For his new religion, Laski turns to Soviet Russia, where men make a fetish of community and a faith of cooperation. Laski substitutes the state for ritual, the shared consumption of goods and services for God. The whole world must come to his way of thinking, says he, or else be prepared for a new dark age. All of this comes under the heading of "Faith." Just where the "Reason" and the "Civilization" come in is not apparent to readers with an ounce of skepticism in their systems. Or Fascist Hell? To Mises, the world started to go to the dogs in the middle of the 19th Century, with the failure in Germany of the liberal revolution of 1848. Still living in the mental climate of feudalism, the Prussian landlords who crushed the revolution could not conceive of an economic society distinct from a political organization. The Prussian attempt to merge economics and politics, to use the power of the state to enhance the competitive power of the German economic machine, naturally provoked fear in Eng land, in France and in the U.S. And each attempt to shelter a group, an industry or a class from competition in the world market has resulted in reprisals. One "planned economy" has begotten another, and country after country has at least partially seceded from the natural world division of labor. The result is the present world anarchy of tariffs, quota systems, prohibition of immigration, subsidized dumping of goods, competitive currency devaluation, armament races. For the parlous state of humanity Mises is inclined to blame the West as well as Germany. After all, he says, state interventionism in the economic process began in France and England.

Facing the future, Mises is filled with gloom. He sees no willingness anywhere to return to the free market. To him there is little difference between British Liberals, British Tories and British Laborites; they all believe in the gospel of government interventionism. Hitler, says Mises, must be defeated. But in defeating him, Mises thinks it likely that the whole world will become fascist. Such, to him, is the logical end of "interventionist" economics, whether it bears the label of "liberalism," "progressivism," "New Dealism," or what not.

Dips of Crotton Sips

CRAZY LIKE A Fox--S. J. Perelman-- Random House ($2.50).

In the threnodic '303 Humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman was just a "fun-loving American boy," "a combination of Raskolnikov and Mark Tidd."* He loved his alma mater's "mingled smell of wood smoke and freshmen." But one day, while "reclining on my chaise longue in a negligee trimmed with marabou," Perelman glanced at the "Why Don't You?" department in Harper's Bazaar: "Why don't you try the effect of diamond roses and ribbons flat on your head, as Garbo wears them when she says good-bye to Armand. . . ?" "Why don't you travel with a little raspberry-colored cashmere blanket?" "Why don't you twist [your daughter's] pigtails around her ears like macaroons?" That chance glance changed Perelman's life. He would become a writer.

Crazy Like a Fox includes 46 of the fey five-finger exercises with which Humorist Perelman has since tickled the funny bones and ribs of readers of the New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. This crowded showcase displays Perelman's talents as a gagman at their best. But it also reveals the monotony of his formula, which to some readers is as enervating, in its way, as the late Harold Bell Wright's.

Funnyman Perelman finds endless inspiration in the vagaries of U.S. advertising. In Tomorrow-Fairly Cloudy he exhorts: "Remember that . . . 500 empty tobacco tins . . . and a 50-word essay on 'Early Kentish Brass Rubbings' entitle you to the Pocahontas Mixture vacation offer, whereby you retire at sixty with most of your faculties impaired." He tells how a Mr. Bradley was drowned in his cellar with his wife and family ("I should have specified Sumwenco Super-Annealed Brass Pipe throughout [but] at least . . . under the Central American Mutual Perpetual Amortizational Group Insurance Plan our loved ones need not be reduced to penury").

John Dewey Rides Again-One Christmas, Humorist Perelman decided to trim a Christmas tree. Advised Mademoiselle: "Dip tips of twisted cotton strips into India ink." Author Perelman went to work muttering: "Tip dips of twisted crotton sips. . . . Sip dips of cristed totton tips." Finally he surrendered to House & Garden's "inspiration of the season--an upside-down-evergreen tree swung from the ceiling."

This weird experience made Perelman feel he had been reading the wrong magazines. He subscribed to the "advanced quarterly," Spindrift, which was running a thrilling serial called Mysticism in the Rationalist Cosmogony, or John Dewey Rides Again. The cattle rustlers (post-Hegelian dogma) had trapped Professor Dewey in an abandoned mine shaft (Jamesian pragmatism) and had ignited the fuse leading to a keg of dynamite (neo-Newtonian empiricism). Perelman also began to write answers for the "Questions" columns of the American Bee Keeper and Oral Hygiene.

Question: "I would like to know the easiest way to get a swarm of bees which are lodged in between the walls of a house." Answer: "Take a small boy smeared with honey and lower him between the walls. The bees will fasten themselves to him by the hundreds and can be scraped off when he is pulled up, after which the boy can be thrown away."

Question: "Could you suggest a method to correct thumb-sucking by an infant of one year?" Answer: "My grandfather . . . used to tie a Mills grenade to the baby's thumb . . . and when the little spanker pulled out the detonating pin with his teeth, Grandpa would stuff his fingers into his ears and run like the wind."

Huxley's New Order

ON LIVING IN A REVOLUTION--Julian Huxley--Harper ($2.50).

Biologist Julian Huxley is the grandson of great Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, son of Biographer Leonard Huxley, brother of Novelist Aldous Huxley, grandnephew of Matthew Arnold, nephew of Mrs. Humphrey Ward. He is also the author of a half-dozen devoutly Darwinian books (Essays in Popular Science; Religion without Revelation). On Living in a Revolution is a typical potpourri of 15 Huxley essays, ranging from war and revolution to bird-watching and "Spoonerisms."*

TVA or Bust. Author Huxley believes that the U.S. is "the only great power" that has refused to face the fact that it is being stood on its head. It is also the only great democracy which has failed to realize that "the democratic idea of freedom . . . must lose its 19th-Century meaning of individual liberty in the economic sphere, and become adjusted to ... more planning and central control."

For man today, Author Huxley insists, there remains but one choice: shall the coming planned society be "democratic or . . . openly or disguisedly Fascist?" To those who believe that all planning is totalitarian, Author Huxley shouts: TVA. The Tennessee Valley Authority, he says, "does not impose a plan forcibly from above; it does not even say, 'Here is a good plan, take it or leave it.' It helps local communities to plan for themselves. . . . Far from crushing private enterprise, planning here has aided it."

Some Huxleyan "general principles" for the Huxleyan "New Order": P:"Darwin . . . made it possible and necessary to dispense with the idea of God." P:"For a justification of our moral code we no theological revelation. . . . Freud in combination with Darwin suffice. ..." P:"The only cure for the insufficiency of science is more science."

Housewife's View

MY LIVES IN RUSSIA -- Markoosha Fischer -- Harper ($2.75). Markoosha Fischer, Russian-born wife of U.S. Correspondent Louis Fischer, has written the first housewife's view of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union. Author Fischer was worried about writing her book because she was afraid it might "give comfort to the enemy." But she decided that "nothing but the truth about Russia can restore honest, clear thinking about that country." Instead of dialectics and statistics, My Lives in Russia (Author Fischer lived there from 1927 to 1939) tells how the rise of a dictatorship and the spread of fear affected "our family . . . our friends and neighbors." Author Fischer had left Russia in 1915, resolved never to return until Tsarism had been abolished. She returned for a brief visit in 1922, was soon convinced that "a magnificent edifice" was emerging from the Revolution's "dirt, ugliness and brutality." In 1927, she made a home in Moscow for herself, her husband, two sons.

With abundant, homely detail Author Fischer reminds Americans, now bemused by Russian heroism, of the unpleasant things which for 20 years were almost all they heard about Red Russia: the overcrowding, the food lines, the famine, the slavery of thought, the purges, the betrayal of parents by their children, the midnight arrests, the ever-present fear of the GPU which made every man distrust his neighbor. When Mrs. Fischer had had enough of it, she was allowed to leave the country only after "important wire-pulling in Washington." Today, Russia's "splendid fight" against the Nazis has not changed Author Fischer's attitude toward the Soviet dictatorship. But she admits that the Russians have "all earthly reasons" for fighting well. "They have education, jobs, medical care, vacations and old-age pensions. . . . Their country is young, rich, vigorous, with tremendous possibilities for a wonderful future. [They] want no other system but their own Soviet system improved by translating the new Constitution from paper, where it now is, into life. . . . They have no say in formulating their policies but they firmly believe when their Government tells them that Russia is the greatest and freest democracy on earth." Her conclusion: "Honest efforts to create a progressive, decent world will be more helpful in democratizing Russia than all the sugary lies told by her political friends and certainly more than the vicious lies told by her enemies."

*Marcus Aurelius Fortunatus ("Mark") Tidd is Clarence Budington Kelland's fat boy whose worldly shrewdness and guile made him beloved a generation of readers of the American Boy. Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov is the ax murderer in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

*Canon William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford (1903-24), was an albino who Author Huxley believes may have "had something a little wrong with some of the association centers of his brain." Most "Spoonerisms" are apocryphal. "Excuse me, but I think you are occupewing my pie," he is supposed to have said politely to a man who took his seat in chapel. "The verger will sew you to another sheet." Other samples: "Oh, please, will nobody pat my hiccup!" he cried when his hat blew off. To the lazy undergraduate: "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have been fighting liars in the quad. In fact, you have tasted two whole worms and you must leave Oxford this afternoon by the town drain."

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