Power and Morality

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Pitirim A. Sorokin was a Komi, a Ugri-Finnish people living in North Russia. In 1906 he was arrested by the Czarist Government. When released, he, a starving and hunted revolutionary, joined a night school and later became a student of the University of St. Petersburg. Two more periods of imprisonment followed However, in 1916 he received the Master's Degree; in 1920 he became a Doctor of Sociology.

For his campaign against Communism, he was arrested in January 1918; in October that year he was again arrested and condemned to death. But, because of his standing in the academic world, he was permitted to rejoin his professorship at the University of St. Petersburg. By 1922 the Communists, embarking upon a crusade against intellectual freedom. arrested and banished Sorokin from Russia.

Since 1948 Sorokin has been the Director of the Harvard Research Centre in Creative Altruism-perhaps the first acade- mic centre of its kind in modern times. Peer of Toynbee, Sorokin has to his credit over a score of learned volumes which survey the whole field of social studies and is compared by some to Comte and Spengler. They blaze an approach similar to that of our ancient seers by which human egoism, fostered and pampered by modern civilization, can be transformed into creative love by a total change in personality.

His book Reconstruction of Humanity, published in this series in 1958, has proved immensely popular and has already necessitated a reprint.

Walter A. Lunden was born in Minnesota in 1899. He received his A.M. degree from University of Minnesota in 1929 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1934.

He taught at University of Pittsburgh from 1931 to 1941 and came to Iowa State University, where he is now Professor of Sociology, since 1947.

During World War I. he served in the U.S. Air Force and returned to the service in 1943 as a Major in the U.S, Army. From 1943 to 1946, he served as a Prison Officer with the British 21st Army and the 7th and 3rd U.S. Army in England, France and Germany. He was Chief of the Prison Branch, OMGB.

The well-being and survival of the human race are today largely determined by a mere handful of the top rulers of the great nuclear powers. In the hollows of their hands they hold the monopolistic control of unprecedented deadly weapons. Upon their wisdom or stupidity largely depends mankind's fate-lasting peace or suicidal war. 'Never before in history has the life or death of so many depended upon so very few! The greatest autocrats of the past had but a fraction of the tremendous power held now by a few members of the Politbureau or the top leaders of the United States ruling elite.

This dangerous situation naturally raises the momentous questions of our time: Can we entrust the fateful decision of war or peace and through that the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" of hundreds of millions of human beings to the few magnates of this power? Do they have the wisdom of the serpent and the innocence of the dove necessary to lead us to a lasting peace and a magnificent future?

For our part we are inclined to answer these questions in the words of the Psalmist: "Put not your trust in princes [and rulers] in whom there is no help" (Psalms, 146: 3). This advice, so correct in regard to the rulers of the past, is particularly timely in its application to contemporary govern- ments. The gigantic tasks of peacefully resolving the tre- mendous difficulties of the present, of preventing new wars, and securing man's creative progress, cannot be entrusted to the existing governments, and especially to "the nuclear governments" of the great powers. Still mainly tribal governments of politicians, by politicians, and for politicians, today's ruling groups do not display the minimum of in- tellectual, moral, and social qualifications necessary for a successful solution of these tremendous tasks.