Judgments & Prophecies, Jan. 3, 1955

BEYOND THE MACHINE: MAN'S GOOD JUDGEMENT

Novelist WILLIAM FAULKNER, in a letter to the New York TIMES:

This is about the Italian airliner which undershot the runway and crashed* at [New York's] Idlewild [ Airport ] after failing three times to hold the instrument glide-path which would have brought it down to the runway. It is written on the idea that the instrument or instruments—altimeter-cum-drift-indicator—failed or had failed, was already out of order or incorrect. It is written in grief. Not just for the sorrow of the bereaved ones of those who died in the crash, and for the airline, but for the pilot himself, who, along with his unaware passengers, was victim of that mystical, unquestioning, almost religious awe and veneration in which our culture has trained us to hold gadgets—any gadget, if it is only complex enough and cryptic enough and costs enough.

I imagine that even after the first failure to hold the glide-path, certainly after the second one, his instinct—the seat of his pants, call it what you will—after that many hours in the air, told him that something was wrong. And his seniority as a four-engine over-water captain probably told him where the trouble was. But he dared not accept that knowledge and act on it. He dared not flout and affront, even with his own life too at stake, our cultural postulate of the infallibility of machines, instruments, gadgets. I grieve for him, for that moment's victims. We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical [gadget] superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject to failure but doomed to it.

GERMANS ALONE MUST NOT NEGOTIATE WITH REDS

KONRAD ADENAUER, Chancellor of the West German Federal Republic, in FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

WE are especially well acquainted with Soviet aims and with the methods by which they are attained. This knowledge has been dearly paid for with the suffering of millions of human beings. For that reason the Germans are convinced that an attempt by Germany alone and apart from the other free nations to solve the problem of German reunification would end with the complete loss of freedom for all Germany. I believe that the only concrete possibility of bringing about the relaxation of the conflict in Europe, and thus of achieving German reunification, lies in an attempt by the Western European Union and the Atlantic Community, acting jointly, to seek a solution of the pending problems with the Soviet Union.

VIET MINH GAINING SUPPORT BY DECEIT