Re. "Herschel Hardin" —— Does anyone bother reading this portentious
thread? Or are people posting without reading?
A few days ago, a correspondent from British Columbia corrected the
original correspondents, pointing out that they were talking about
*Garret* Hardin, not Herschel Hardin.
The difference is not without significance.
Garret Hrdin was a brilliant biosociological writer of the late 1960's
and early 1970's, who essentially developed sophisticated arguments
against conventional approaches to social-economic amelioration. One
admired his brilliance, but at the same time suspected that he was
modernizing some of the "tooth and fang" arguments of 19th century
biological determinists and their neo-conservative social brethern
(Malthus, Spencer, Sumner. Calvin Coolidge). The world being what it
is, nothing can be done except by drastic methods; drastic methods being
too horendous to actually implement, we'd better accept the world at it
is; having proven intellectually how deadlocked we actually are, we can
and must resign ourselves to accepting not just the biological world as
it is but the social-economic world as well. Nothing can be done --
c'est la vie -- faut de mieux, enrichez nous et apres nous, la deluge.
This is terribly clever stuff, don't you think?
Herschel Hardin, on the other hand, was a somewhat less clever (at least
in his writings) but dedicated, and original, West Coast democratic
socialist whose most significant work, A NATION UNAWARES, appeared in
the early 1970's. He basically attempted a rewrite of Canadian economic
history in terms of the possibilities of a society using its resources
and traditions to try to shape its own destiny. Whether this is a
forelorn hope, or not, in the period of apparent globalistic "triumph of
the will" (in which we take the Sukarnos, Saddam Husseins, and Li Pengs
more seriously as co-determiners of our destiny and the future of our
economy and working people than the Chretiens et al.), it is hard to
say. But, recalling Hardin (Herschel, that is) reminds one of the point
that Shelley made early in the history of English socialism: that
Prometheus must keep trying to help the people, no matter how often he
is cast down from the mountain, no matter how gruesome his personal
fate. I will reread Herschel Hardin, because I think he was/is very
much in this latter tradition: keep trying, keep fighting, no matter
what the odds and no matter how brilliantly you can argue yourself out
of it. (I don't know Herschel Hardin personally, and don't really know
what he has written since the 1970's, but heard recently that he was
still active in Vancouver-area NDP politics and activism).
So let's keep these two approaches separate, even if it takes a bit of
care in our correspondence. Orwell (another "golden oldie") often wrote
that, to begin with, it is necessary to be clear in one's view of
society, to try to be scrupulously accurate, and to write in a manner
that conveys this to others. Perhaps we might begin to apply this to
the Internet age.
S. Silverman
