How To Change the World

Harvard is a strange place to learn to change the world. The University is very good, of course, at training students to transform the universe of science and scholarship. But in the course of four years, we learn very little that prepares us to take on the real world, the nasty world that doesn’t care about theorems or the snows of yesteryear. Why, then, are Harvard students so often told that they must be the leaders of tomorrow, that they must gather briefly on the banks of the Charles and then depart to serve better their country and their kind?

I learned part of the answer almost two years ago, when I took a course on Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein. These are perhaps the three philosophers most useless for the task of social change; revolutionaries seek thrilling apostrophes to the workers of the world, not absurd questions such as “what is the number one?” Yet as we worked through the syllabus, I was struck by Frege’s injunction “always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical”—to distinguish clearly the reasons why we ought to hold our beliefs from the contingencies, causes and baser instincts that might explain why we do hold them. It seems like an obvious point, especially in the context of Frege’s philosophy of mathematics; to see why the Pythagorean Theorem is true, we don’t need to know anything about Pythagoras or his mood that fateful morning.

But it’s surprising how often the point can be forgotten. When the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) took over Mass. Hall last spring, I began to reexamine my own views on Harvard’s wages. After several months of frustration, I asked a prominent and articulate member of PSLM for an explanation of his position on a living wage and for his answers to the questions that it posed. What are the criteria for determining an adequate wage? Do employers owe obligations to their employees as individuals, or to the society in which they are hired? What are the boundaries of the “community” so often cited in these debates, and what role does it play in their resolution?

The response, unfortunately, focused almost exclusively on my status as questioner rather than the question. As well as Harvard’s “obvious” obligation to pay higher wages, it noted the equally obvious fact that those with the leisure to engage in such philosophical musings must hesitate before demanding justifications from those who do not. The response reminded me of a tactic once described by Isaiah Berlin, of resolving the difficult questions of life by “so treating the questioner that problems which appeared at once so overwhelmingly important and utterly insoluble vanish from the questioner’s consciousness like evil dreams and trouble him no more.”

For someone who wants to change the world, this approach makes perfect sense. The effort to build coalitions and implement new policies is fundamentally an effort to deal with people and not with arguments; the goal is not to interpret the world, but to change it.

Yet this inattention to reasons in favor of motives, the focus on the questioner rather than the question, is extremely dangerous. Though voting patterns and demographics may be crucial to amassing power or winning elections, they don’t tell us anything about the ends to which our efforts should be applied. They tell us how to change the world, but not how the world ought to be changed—and without this knowledge, we are truly powerless to act.

Half a century ago, Berlin wrote of a widespread reluctance to engage the kind of ideological questions that had resulted in so much bloodshed in previous decades. He saw then what many others observe today—a shift of emphasis away from disagreement about political principles to “disagreements, ultimately technical, about methods,” about achieving the prosperity and security “without which arguments concerned with fundamental principles and the ends of life are felt to be ‘abstract,’ ‘academic,’ and unrelated to the urgent needs of the hour.”

The apathy that stems from this absence of real debate, from the reluctance to engage ideas, creates not so much a “center” as a vacuum. Positions are chosen, not because they are believed in, but because they are politically comfortable. Perhaps this is why the most active voices in national politics today seem to arise from the radical fringe, from the Christian Coalition or the people in turtle suits—those who show “commitment” and hold Truth on their side. The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity...

A college education may not teach the meaning of life or even how to live, but it should awaken a recognition of how much there is yet to learn—and for this, even Frege and an aged university can be a useful guide. No matter how much effort we place on the means, discovering ways to pressure and persuade, to seize the city and to impose our own visions of the future, we will never learn how we are to use our newfound power, or what kind of world we should resolve to build. Such questions may be “abstract” or “academic,” but when it comes to the “urgent needs of the hour,” they are anything but unrelated. If we hope to change the world for the better, we must learn to interpret it first.

Stephen E. Sachs ’02, a history concentrator in Quincy House, was an editorial chair of The Crimson in 2001.