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American Food, Morality and Science

National peculiarities of daily life, private as well as pub-lic, are consequences of the way the political rule of a country commands and allows its citizens to meet the necessities of the form of production it administers. The fact that production and distribution are capitalistic does not lay down the way people habitually deal with the pressures of wage labor and capital. That set of customs, which is commonly attributed to people as its character, arises from the way the state organizes competition, as a result ofhow earlier modes ofproduction have been over-come, how the classes have fought over their means of competing (whereby the preservation or destruction of the traditional way of life can take on very different forms). This "national character" thus does exist objectively, though not at all as a natural psychological property of the individuals born in a certain region. It even extends to the contents of feelings, the activity of the im-agination and one's view of the world, leading to generally accepted prejudices, views of social life, of one's own place in the hierarchy of class society and to common interpretations of success and failure, of wealth and poverty. And it also leads the members of different nations to dispute about each other's ways and views of life, using their own prejudices as the solid Standard for accusing the foreign culture of being inferior or for certifying that it has merits.

In the case of the United States, foreign observers can rarely suppress their envy of this nation's strength and wealth, which betrays a fair portion of recognition. But when it comes to U.S. culture, the lovers of humanism, classical works, savoir-vivre and European breeding -including many an American intellectual - ary very quick to be derogatory. More than one admirer of the economic impact of the U.S. has come up with cultural criticism" as a reaction to the fact that Coca-Cola, chewing gum machines and McDonald's are to be found all over the world. As if the Yanks were barbarians just because they have hamburgers on their menus and their sweet swill is not to everyone's taste!

Of course, the quick snacks and the gastronomy that goes with them do have something to do with the American way of life — but sherry and escargots are far from being the seal ofan exquisite mentality or guaranteeing intellectual encounters of the highest class. When people compare American and European eating, drinking and Speech habits, the inevitably come up with precisely the prejudice they wanted to illustrate in the first place — and not a critique of U.S. cultural imperialism. This luxurious point of view is apparent just as offensively when the admirers of higher nonsense apply their Standards to American artistic and intellectual life, only to discover an abyss of cretinism in the United States. Such critics show no interest in knowing what really makes American scientists and artists tick.

This whole critical attitude tends to boil down to the objection that the Yanks fall to play up unimportant areas as ifthe world depended on them. A nation which enjoys imperialist success does not happen to require any seal of quality in the form of its own idealistic reworkings of the world. It practises its culture in the knowledge that the level of intellectual and artistic effort is not what determines the value of a nation. It is the other way round: the position of power a nation has at-tained legitimizes whatever whims it produces on the cultural front. Americans have no doubt that their Standards are the valid ones and that those of other countries are only respectable in so far as Americans respect them.

Of course, it is easy to see what shocks esthetes, instead of provoking an objective judgement from them. The particular relationship between the state and its citizens in the U.S. leaves its traces on cultural affairs. Morality does not fünction as a censor of "egoism," but rather as a technique individuais make use ofto achieve their goals. The fonns ofpublic hypocrisy are not forms ofdisguise and do not require the pathos of humanism or even politeness, but instead obey the principle of casual and blunt familiarity. The intellectis essentially practical; it is praised for proving its worth in dealing with the most trivial everyday problems. In the U.S., knowledge is equated fundamentally with "useful Information" and "know-how." Thus, in science, it is synonymous with useful technological knowledge; in the humanities it is one big collection of analogously constructed methods for dealing successfully with the barriers one encounters in institutions, in one's dear fellow creatures, and — last but not least — in oneself. This considerably diminishes the pompous kingdom of values which European intellectual giants regard as the indispensable counterpart to the "bad side" of man," his materialism.

Even American philosophy, which formally deals with exactiy the same "fundamental questions" as to human aspirations on this planet as its European relative, has emancipated itself in the name of the American way of life from the lofty metaphysics that never seem to end. It does not offer any high-flown idealistic justification for bourgeois morality, but deduces humanity's competitive way of "coexisting" simply from "practical arguments," i.e. examples ofsuccess drawn from every-day American life. The fact that not a single correct thought is put to paper in the process does not disturb anybody, including those moral philosophers who complain about the lack of depth. Americans also have an easy time of it in the discipline "ethics for scientists," which delves into the ulterior conditions for, and possibilities of, knowledge and always ends up issuing commands and prohibitions for the activity of the mind. The philosophers of pragmatism speak of something as sublime for tradition-conscious minds as the "concept of truth" in the following manner:

The possession of truth, so far from being here end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions.-.The practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practical importance of their objects to us...Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advantage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say ofit then either that "it is useful because it is true" or that "it is true be-cause it is usefui." Both these phrases mean exactiy the same thing...Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they pay..The payments true ideas bring are the sole why of our duty to follow them. Identical whys exist in the case ofwealth and health." (The Writings of William James, 1967, p. 431 ff.)

For this theory of science it is obviously entirely superfluous to deal with the problems immanent to science, even for the sake of appearances. The equation of true" and "useful" spares such theorists considerable fuss over subjects, objects, methods, logic and transcendency, etc. One is reminded ofthose Hollywood movies in which the government keeps a professor or a scientific adviser, maybe even a gangster band its "doc" — a guy who still has a trick up his sieeve when everyone eise has run out of ideas. The Americans do not worry about the freedom of science being used responsibly, loyally, ethically, etc. — every thought is okay by them; who knows when it might come in handy!

This is also the attitude of American society towards its honorable scientists. They are held in limited esteem, and their limited eamings do not allow for the elite-con-scious behavior that is met with at European universities. On the one hand, U.S. scientists are eggheads, impractical idiots; on the other, they are useful figures with an Output ofhighiy specialized Software that is not to be scoffed at as it may very well prove useful. The American attitude to science discioses, not moral regulations, but the expectation that this sphere should provide a mountain of ideas, whereby a certain amount of garbage cannot be avoided. Industry, the Church and all branches of the armed forces have their staff of scientists, certain that it's the quantity - of unusual practical ideas — that counts, and the financial security "think tanks" enjoy is the envy of even the snobbiest foreign academic.

It is no wonder the Viennese Circle and its esoteric construction of "exact science," its search for a "unified science" (a reaction to the pluralism merrily engaged in by theorists of science), its ambition to develop an arfificial "language" and its accompanying regulations on "correct thinking," met with benevolent dissolution in the United States. On the one hand, there was no Opposition to this way of not participating in the progress of science but rather sounding off, in the name of science, about hypothesis and verification, the dubiousness of language, induction and sentences containing the word "all." The offshoots of the Viennese Circle were given a livelihood and allowed to increase their problems by about twenty a year. On the other hand, they were served the American Version of Camap's "tolerance principle" in science — by one of their own crowd. A man fittingly named Feyerabend (German for "let's call it quits" - in this case all correct science) challenged their bom-bastic fuss with a polemic "Against Method." He renewed the old pragmatic slogan that scientific judgements are as such uninteresting — they only need to be (potentially) applicable: "Anything goes."

A final remark should be made on the natural sciences which, in their effective application, are the basis of American industry, from comflake production to space technology. The reason why Americans are so casual about scientific findings on the laws that hold in nature is simply the advantage they enjoy in this area (as they say, advantage is the crux ofall science!). The U.S. could easily do without theoreticians because it was lucky enough to have all knowledge of the laws of nature, i.e. objective knowledge, delivered ready-to-use from Europe. By importing Albert Einstein and a few nuclear physicists, it even procured the theoreticians still required in the twentieth Century to explain how and why things happen the way they do. It did not hurt the Americans to limit their efforts to technology since they could do quite a bit using the chemical, physical and biological knowledge imported from the Old World, and were saved the bother of working it all out themselves. The Nobel prizes have been awarded for technical innovations for some time anyway, which does justice to the history of science and bestows a good many winners on the United States. As far as the theoretical problems yet to be solved are concemed, they are in areas (biochemistry, nuclear physics and elementary particies, etc.) in which success depends on the size of the research laboratory, so that the U.S., because ofits economic strength, can even score a few points for its national honor as a re-sult of the fact that experimentation has an important function for the acquisition of knowledge in the natural sciences.

So generations of young people will always be taught that Thomas A. Edison was the greatest; everyone is supposed to bear him in mind as the ideal of "American ingenuity," since it is much more useful to invent some device than to discover some law of nature no one understands anyway...

Ifthe American government, industry and especially the military have become interested in research being consistently separated from education, i.e. the breeding of technology specialists, this method is confirmed by its success.