When Intellectuals Meet

On the third day of last week's meeting of intellectuals at Princeton, a student observer complained to a reporter that he hadn't learned anything new in the last 72 hours.

The reporter looked at him sympathetically and shrugged his shoulders. The message was clear: what did you expect?

In the end the spectacular gathering of intellectuals from 28 countries probably didn't teach anyone enough to justify the expense of putting it together, but for the uninitiated, it did contain a valuable lesson in one little known art: conferencemanship.

Generalizing on the basis of last week's affair is somewhat dangerous for it was exceptional in a number of ways--mainly the poor organization and size.

The precise purpose of the gathering remained obscure throughout--the directors of the conference never went beyond the phrase "exchanging ideas." At a news conference early in the proceedings there was some talk of representatives of the Nixon administration coming to hear the ideas exchanged, but they never showed up. And Carl M. Kaysen, co-chairman of the seminar, specifically rejected the notion that any policy statements could come of an international seminar of that kind.

If an exchange of ideas was the purpose, however, the nature of the conference format was less than ideal. The topic of the four day talks was no less than "the United States: its Problems, Image and Impact in the World." The discussion allotted one day to the internal problems of the U.S., one day to the character of the post-industrial society (Daniel Bell's phrase for a coming age of plenty and leisure), one day to the problems of U.S. foreign policy, and one day to the cultural future of the world. For obvious reasons, much of the scheduled exchange fell back upon generalizations which were assumed to begin with.

The numbers of participants proved another problem. Every morning at 9:30, a procession of 100 scholars and celebrities straggled out of the Princeton Inn, a long Georgian mansion sitting on the edge of a golf course, and wound its way through the Gothic arches of the Princeton yard to Whig Hall, the Princeton debating hall. There the group reassembled around chains of green-felted tables. The first day the tables were arranged in a horseshoe, which left some members separated by as much as 30 yards. The next day, the conference directors rearranged the setting trying to inject some sense of community.

'80 Flowers Bloom'

Disciplining the discussion, however, proved far more difficult than seating the host of participants. At the outset, Kaysen warned that he might have to limit speaking time to "let 80 flowers bloom." They bloomed in a vast tangle. On the first day of the discussion--which proved the most productive in many ways--the conversation bounced from the problems of blacks in America, to the problems of big bureaucracy and corporate capitalism. A Czech economist, Eugene Loebl, interjected the problems of youth as a sub-theme, but conversation turned away after an insistent Italian suggested that the American crisis could not really be separated from the problems of the world at large, and particularly the underdeveloped countries. Kaysen explained politely to him that the rest of the world would be considered two days hence.

Despite the conference's size, the group was surprisingly close knit and insular. It was somehow satisfying to walk into the cocktail party that initiated the conference and see Harold Cruse, the black writer, deep in conversation with Jan Kott, the Polish professor of Comparative Literature. Still, it was at the same time disconcerting to see how many of the new arrivals greeeted each other as old friends. Either the intellectual world was very small or representatives of only a small part of it had made it to the conference.

The truth was probably more the latter than the former. In fact, the conference drew almost exclusively on the much-maligned "liberal establishment." In a closing attack Sam Brown, a former Harvard Divinity student, seized on this as a major failing of the conference. Before he spoke a few lonely pickets outside the Princeton Theological Seminary (where the closing session was held) made the same point. "These tired old conferees are being used to give the illusion that 'intellectuals' are participating in America's absurdity," their sign read and then listed I.F. Stone, Dwight MacDonald, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, Mary McCarthy, and Andrew Kopkind as likely intellectuals who might have been invited. Brown added Tom Hayden to the list.

Harold Cruse made the same comments privately about blacks. He and Roy Innis, director of CORE, were the only two blacks at the conference, though Charles V. Hamilton Jr. was invited and did not attend.

Avoiding the Fringes

As Kaysen later pointed out, the conference organizers had no obligation to represent all areas of the political spectrum. Still, it seems likely that the conference would have been more successful if they had made a concerted effort to pull in the fringes. Shepherd Stone, the President of the International Association for Cultural Freedom which sponsored the conference, originally justified the choice of conferees as an attempt to insure "rational discussion." But one had an annoying sense that it was the style of discussion, as much as the size of the conference or its organization, that hamstrung its efforts to get at the substance of the issues.

Sam Brown tried to make this point in his final remarks when he attacked the participants for lacking passion in their approach to the problems of youth and the plight of blacks. Brown was not implying that passion should supplant reason in the discussion, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. accused him of saying. He seemed rather to sense that talk of the previous days had gone to the other extreme, that the syle of reasoned discussion had detached the conference too much from the reality of the social crisis occurring outside of the sedate, columned Whig Hall, and indeed, outside of Princeton.

The style of reasoned discussion, as employed during the conference, meant more than just the application of analysis to social problems. It meant an approach to ideas, and specifically ideas as solutions to social problems. Intellectuals, of course, are idea-smiths by definition. Their livelihood and self-confidence depend on their ability to apply reason to problems. But in many ways, the ego-in-volvement of the participants was all too apparent at the conference. There were few questions asked and many speeches made. Lines of argument were rarely followed up. The participants sat while one would-be lecturer after another stood, carved out rounded arguments, presented them with self-conscious eloquence, and then sat down with satisfaction. At one point, R. M. Soedjatmoko, the Indonesian Ambassador to the United States and one of the most provocative of the conference members, asked the American participants to please define precisely what the liberal institutions of America are, and precisely what their crisis entails. That was well into the second day of discussion, and it struck everyone as a peculiarly insightful and relevent question.

The press played a peculiar role in encouraging this self-indulgence. It obviously considered itself unsullied by what one Harvard scholar called "the circus" in Whig Hall. And it broke into vigorous applause when Sam Brown delivered his blistering attack on the fourth day of the conference. Still, why the press was there at all was a mystery to most of the participants, and by its elaborate coverage--there were probably as many reporters as participants and the cameramen were ubiquitous--the news media admitted implicitly the importance of the people whom it ridiculed in daily copy. Most of their stories were manufactured. They wondered through the dinners and cocktail parties sometimes ignored, but sometimes attracting knots of intellectuals who spoke as avidly as the reporters wrote.

All this is a comment not so much on the intentions of the scholars as their isolation. They defined and redefined the problems facing the U.S., but they refused to go beyond the definitions. They refused to even consider the directions in which solutions might lie. In a conference which decided that bureaucracy in large, modern states threatens the power of individuals, no one mentioned Yugoslavia's experiment in worker participation. The problems and prospects for community control and de-centralization in the U.S. were mentioned only very briefly. The sense of urgency seemed lacking, buried in reasoned discussion. The student observers at the conference (by no means militants themselves) fantasized about yelling obscenities or enacting a guerrilla theatre just to shake things up. And Brian Walden, a labor M.P. in Great Britain, seemed to put his finger on the problems when he said, "I am a politician. I therefore have an advantage over most of the people here--I sometimes see ordinary people."

Inviting radicals or more blacks would not have meant solving any more problems, but it would at least have provided a break in the conference style. As it turned out, the most effective and stirring moments usually occurred when someone let down his guard, or when a dispute among conferees reproduced social conflicts in the conference room. The first day, John B. Oakes, editorial page editor of the New York Times, and Roy Innis squared off in a debate over the relative merits of integration and black separatism as solutions to black problems. While the exchange was nothing new for Americans, it gave many Europeans their first inkling of the gulf between blacks and whites in this country