Paul Goodman Quotes
To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man.
Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. Random House, 1960.
This is a very material quotation with regard to Congress creating science-related policies and legislation. The members of Congress know the least about scientific matters than almost anything else that they have to legislate about. So typically they rely on scientific experts. Scientists are witnesses at Congressional hearings and often the political, polarized staff arrange to have scientists who disagree in something. They both have PhDs in the field, but one may be a great scientists and the other, a lightweight. This is where Alverez’s point becomes so critical. The Congress and staff have to learn how to differentiate between a “second rater” or a “Fermi” one of the great physicists of all time.
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American author and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before attending graduate school in Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, many of which he lost for his outward bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. He became one of the founders of gestalt therapy and took patients through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically. His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. His celebrity did not endure far beyond his life, but Goodman is remembered for his principles, outré proposals, and vision of human potential.
