The Lotus and the Robot, by Arthur Koestler (Macmillan, $3.95). The West has lost faith in itself, and is hot on several false scents which lead, like most of the Western wanderings from its destined way, into an Oriental wasteland. Whether this particular wandering will finally efface the hard lines that Western man has marked out for his journey—this will be determined by one thing: will we have the nerve to decide that, as Newman put it, for all the real business of mankind “Western civilization is civilization simply”; or, as Belloc put it, “outside is the Night”? There is no way to prove Newman’s or Belloc’s statements to men who have not submitted themselves (or will not) to the vast disciplines of this tradition. This creates a dilemma which is resolved, as far as it can be, by Mr. Koestler, who actually went East wafted by the modern longing for answers that Aristotle and Aquinas cannot give. Koestler does not speak from the core of a tradition that would have made such a pilgrimage impossible; but as a vivid reporter with a quick eye, he exercises all those instincts—blunted, blurred, half-buried—that still prod us on whenever we rise to the measure of our past. He is genuinely surprised to find that, even in a Troy half-razed, he is Hector at the gate—and so will many of his readers be. He successfully “sneaks up” on the modern mind, and manipulates its prejudices, because he sees with an innocent eye and no deeper set of guides than his acute instincts. He went to learn from the wise men of the East, and found that the wisest of them had long ago followed a Westward-traveling star. G. wills
The Kohler Strike: Union Violence and Administrative Law, by Sylvester Petro (Regnery, $3). The author of this small authoritative volume probes his case with the sure-fingered economy of a fine surgeon. Sylvester Petro has worked in steel mills, and in the 1930s he was a union organizer; now he is a professor of law at New York University and a specialist in labor law. He removes the dressing from the wounds of the nation’s most outrageous strike and explains anew what happens when the United Automobile Workers and the National Labor Relations Board gang up on a good company. It isn’t pretty, even though Kohler has robustly survived—so far. Then, in the best tradition of preventive medicine, Professor Petro tells us how such assaults can be guarded against, or their harm modified. Let labor disputes revert to the courts, where rules of law and fair play, evolved over the centuries, will prevail. The alternative, if companies are to stand up to union bullying as Kohler has done, is ugly strife and lots of it. J. G. ackelmtre
Comments