Judgments & Prophecies: DEMOCRACY REQUIRES DISSENTING OPINIONS

• Share

LEARNED HAND, retired chief judge of the Second Circuit United States Court of Appeals, speaking before the annual meeting in New York of the American Jewish Committee.

WHY is it that totalitarianisms arouse our deepest hostility? The best answer is not so much in their immoral quality as in the fact that they are inherently unstable because they are at war with our only trustworthy way of living in accord with the facts. For it is only by trial and error, by insistent scrutiny and by readiness to re-examine presently accredited conclusions that we have risen, so far as in fact we have risen, from our brutish ancestors, and in our loyalty to these habits lies our only chance, not merely of progress, but even of survival. They were not indeed a part of our aboriginal endowment: Man, as he emerged, was not prodigally equipped to master the infinite diversity of his environment. Obviously, enough of us did manage to get through, but it has been a statistical survival, for the individual's native powers of adjustment are by no means enough for his personal safety, any more than are those of other creatures. The precipitate of our experience is far from absolute verity, and our exasperated resentment at all dissent is a sure index of our doubts. All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question, and in consequence to upset, existing convictions: that is precisely its purpose and its justification. He is. indeed, a ''subversive'' who disputes those precepts that I most treasure and seeks to persuade me to substitute his own. He may be of those to whom any forcible sanction of conformity is anathema; yet it remains true that he is trying to bring about my apostasy, and I hate him just in proportion as I fear his success. Heretics have been hateful from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them, and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

EISENHOWER & CHIANG MISJUDGE RED PLANS

Columnist JOSEPH ALSOP. writing from Formosa:

ONE point on which President Eisenhower and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek appear to be in agreement is that the Chinese Communists will not press the Formosa crisis to a warlike conclusion. No single piece of tangible evidence supports the official judgment in Washington and Taipeh. This judgment of the Formosa crisis has been reached, very evidently, by calculating what we would do if we were the Chinese Communists ruling in Peking. But it is always well to remember that we are not they. Those who hold this conviction somehow manage to overlook both Red China's warlike preparations and warlike declarations. The forces for an attack are in place. Meanwhile, the. Peking government has been promising its people to take Formosa this year at the top of its voice. The Peking leaders have also been assuring leaders of neutral nations, like Burma and India, that they mean every word they say about taking Formosa.