Difficulties . . .

The talk is bound to go on as long as conferences are held; for after all conferences are held so that people may be able to confer. There is bound to be even more talk than in a national conference or a national parliament, simply because of the nature of words and of the assumptions behind the words, which are different for New Zealanders, or Frenchmen, or Swedes, or Americans, or Ecuadorians. Even with the most skilful technique of translation, people are bound to get at cross purposes; and in the face of incomprehension there is bound to be intrigue, pacts about voting, struggles over non-essentials of phraseology, honest indignation. One could take half a dozen separate instances off-hand as the test for an improving dissertation on national psychology; and indeed, until one gets an awareness of this snag in the way of international co-operation, one cannot work to full value. The same thing, I understand, gets in the way of efficient functioning of the Secretariat; a man of large experience told me that no international Civil Service can hope to work with more than about thirty per cent of the efficiency of a national civil service. This may be an underestimate as far as the "hope" is concerned; after all, international civil services only go back to the League of Nations, and efficient national civil services have taken a long while to build up. The wonder perhaps is, that certain departments of the Unesco Secretariat work so well. I think inevitably of the Education Department, for that was knocked into shape by a New Zealander, Beeby. and let me remark in this place that the world was fortunate to get Beeby as Assistant Director-General in Charge of Education when it did. Those eighteen months made all the difference. Make no doubt about it. Beeby is an international figure of some note. Those hostile to our Education Department in New Zealand, please assimilate. The difficulty is to get similar men, at once enormously able and quite disinterested, to run other departments. There are men, but they generally have other jobs already, and conflicts of allegiance arise continually. Until there is a first-rate team of such men, able, honest, diplomatic, and with a capacity for putting first things first, Unesco will not be working as it should.

. . . With Verbiage . . .

To return to words again, it was inevitable that a UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation should in its early days get bogged down. Talk about education, science and culture in any language and you get inevitably bogged down. In seven or eight languages you tend to take refuge in incantation, and there are undoubtedly some people at conferences who haven't got past that stage yet. Still, once again consider the part that incantation plays in the national scene before you tend to despair. The difficulty of course is to do anything solid about "Culture," to do something on an international scale which is not just propaganda, or professional liaison or simply rahrah stuff without any significance whatever.

. . . Are Surmounted

The difficulty becomes all the greater, when one gets away from abstraction, and considers the twin purposes with which UNESCO was founded; for while the programme was aimed at carrying the world inheritance of education, science and culture the total population of the world, in the faith that these things were ends in themselves, yet it was all to be done in the cause of "international understanding," of world peace. Now the twins don't necessarily run all the while in double harness. Take a long view, by all means; but remember that you have to get the governments of fifty or sixty member states to take a long view as well. Remember also that the USSR has never been a member state, and that the rest" of us are all by definition the hired lackeys of American Imperialism. I should perhaps add on that theme that in my experience, the lackeys have not, been nearly worthy of their, hire; they have really been remarkably insubordinate, independent and intransigent.

Subsidaries

You can do specific jobs with education; if you don't do those, indeed, its a bit silly talking about science and culture (in any non-anthropoligical sense) for what is still a very large percentage of mankind the work for "fundamental education"—i.e. the attempt to make people literate in which UNESCO is engaged is therefore I suppose more important than anything else. At the other end of the scale is the Council of Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, which UNESCO was instrumental in forming. Somewhere between those came the Field Science Co-operative Offices apparently very successful, and of increasing importance in, say, East Africa as clearing house for scientific information, particularly for the application of science to the economic and social problems of "undeveloped" (modern polite term) areas. In fact it is all, in one way or another, education. But then the scientists were anxious to get science in by name; and indeed my impression is that, with Julian Huxley as first Director General, they rather galloped away with the whole show. It has taken a good deal of setting-out and arrangement of "priorities" and hard experience to get a sense of proportion on top, And while all the big new schemes were being thought up and "implemented" or knocked back, and while everybody was getting restive about another war, there was still the awful wreckage of the last war to be cleared up. I think UNESCO has done something useful; about all that in Europe. God knows there is still plenty to do, even in the re-building of primary education—quite apart from the provision of university libraries and microscopes.

Towards Peace

Education, science, culture, international understanding, world peace; they do hang together if we think of them as all ingredients of the civilised life. But the question of the double-harnessed twins comes up again, and brings up with it one of the regular causes of tension (favourite UNESCO word at the General Conference). Some of us, e.g. British Scandinavians, New Zealanders—regard world peace as an end product; let UNESCO get on with its day to day work, we argue, conscientiously, honestly, efficiently, without too much excitement, or wild enthusiasm, plodding seriously because it is a long journey with no short cuts, and one day we will find that it has done something appreciable to make people literate, tolerant, aware of other points of view; on that day international understanding, and the psychological basis for peace will be rather nearer than they are now But for other—e.g. the present Director General, an able man, haunted with a vision of horrors, he considers the modern technique of war—that 13 not enough. It even seems cowardly.

UNESCO, they argue, should do something decisive, signal, dramatic and do it now; something that will rouse and stiffen the conscience of mankind. What! A world congress of intellectuals to condemn atomic warfare? That has been suggested. But the plodders remain unconvinced. Preambles, manifestos, declarations, they have a part in the making of history, yes; but it does not seem that our generation is really suffering from too little eloquence.

So no doubt' delegations will continue to argue at sessions of the General Conference, and the Executive Board will meet far into the night. Meanwhile it is important to note that while arguments are swallowing their billions of dollars, UNESCO is doing a number of wise and valuable things on eight million.