[FirstClassSkeptic]

I don't know who the guy is, and I have just one quote from him, and I can't even remember where it came from. Just have it jotted in my notes from a few years ago:

"Traditional nationalism cannot survive the fissioning of the atom."

[rerevisionist]

I have a few notes on him; he wrote 'The Tyranny of Words', and the following is from 'What I Believe' (1940), where he was one contributor out of about two dozen---

[b. 1888; MIT, Harvard cum laude, class of Lippmann, John Reed etc; joined father's accountancy firm, later investigated food packaging industry [like Upton Sinclair?] and joined a labor bureau organisation]

[Note: good attempt to examine own mental state and reactions:] '.. Perhaps as good a way as any other to formulate my living philosophy is to reconstruct some actual situations, and note how I reacted to them. .. For sixteen hours in the day, I am faced with decisions which determine my behaviour as a biological item on this planet. .. Happily, many decisions are made for me by a nervous system well adapted to defend the organism from meddling by the conscious mind. Without these sheltered reactions, I should have been dead long ago. Only this morning I escaped a nasty fall from a stone wall by unconsciously thrusting out an arm to regain balance.

Another long list of decisions is made for me by the customs and folkways of my tribe. One does not go to a dinner party in a bathing suit, hot as the evening may be. ..

.. Why do I act or react thus , rather than so ? .. Let us now examine seven specific cases. [These are: Driving at night, dipping lights etc, his mental processes thinking of a car he passed omitting to dip/ Meeting a black man married to a white Russian teacher in Odessa (famous stone steps, 1904)/ Albuquerque, New Mexico; 'US Soil Conservation Service'/ Homosexual advance by man in pink shirt; he reflects that 'some borderline cases can be reversed by a good psychiatrist.'/ Hegel's definition of love; Chase rejects Hegel, crosses out his sentence about America will never tolerate fascism/ Hangs up on man offering him money to write copy advertising a worthless patent medicine/ Good description of how US depression felt to Americans in it] Summarises his cases, makes notes on dustbowls, the popular conservation theme of the time, comments on fanaticisms.

______________________

A lot of people thought nuclear weapons would bring great changes as no doubt they would have. For example, Bertrand Russell wrote that fear of the 'bomb' makes it irrational to live in big cities. Of course many people believed nationalism caused all wars, just as people used to think religion caused all wars, and may have beleved empires caused all wars, or love of gold cause all wars. Lennon Imagine there's no Heaven/ It's easy if you try/ No hell below us/ Above us only sky/ Imagine all the people/ Living for today// You may say I'm a dreamer/ But I'm not the only one/ I hope someday you'll join us/ And the world will be as one// Imagine there's no countries/ It isn't hard to do/ Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too/ Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace etc combines two of them.

There are so many ways people can be subdivided, and so many ways in which one group can benefit at the expense of other(s), that it's hard to see what's needed so that some groups won't benefit by violence.

[rerevisionist]

Chase was a bit of a lefty, in what I take to be the genuine sense. Heres a footnote in Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson (1978): Stuart Chase, in his Mexico, A Study of Two Americas (Macmillan, 1931), makes it plain that wherever in Mexico a handicraft culture has survived, unemployment is unknown, and likewise destitution, recession and inflation. I hadn't heard of Simpson's book; very likely because he has a lot of comments on eugenics and imporivng human stock.

Chase is mentioned in George Orwell's Politics and the English Language: Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language

Another quotation: Marriner Eccles also had much to say about the creation of money. He considered himself an economist, and had been brought into the Government service by Stuart Chase and Rexford Guy Tugwell, two of Roosevelt's early brain-trusters. Eccles was the only one of the Roosevelt crowd who stayed in office throughout his administration.