Diario las Américas Newspaper, June 9, 1957, Page 24

I HAVE FORMED these impres- sions of Europe in 1956 mainly in the universities, though also in in- dustrial areas, factories, and theat- ers, among politicians, business- men, engineers, priests, working- men, country people. But in Eu- rope nowadays the universities are much more closely linked than formerly with these other spheres of life. They are more attentive to what goes on outside, less isolated in the ivory tower of merely aca- demic — at times, Byzantinely aca- demic — problems and studies. To be sure, it would be deplor- able if the universities ceased en- tirely to be Marys in order to be- come Marthas. But somewhere be- tween the two extremes they seem to be finding a middle ground Paris and & aS Berlin. Yet ali of them are essentially very British. The English seemed much con- cerned with the problems suggest- ed by the world automation — which ought, I believe to be auto- matization. If machines continue to take the place not merely of men but of intelligent men, what will become of the majority of the population in countries like Eng- land? They will have to stand by with their arms folded, watching the machines perform feats of in- telligence and learning that would put Pico della Mirandola in the shade. And how can this super- progress be adjusted to the human level? I saw Englishmen reduced by the prospect to a state com- parable to Hamlet’s — a “to be University of Salamanca, Spain, welcomed author. .There he visited quarters (now museum) of Unamuno, once Rector, more salubrious than either. This I noticed even In circles once so clos- ed to the world that their mem- bers seemed to be living under glass. In Edinburgh, presiding at a lunchegn held in my honor, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, the famous English physicist Sir Edward Appleton, told me he could see no essential difference between so-called “pure” science and so-called ‘“‘applied” science. I visited several British univer- sities. Some were old_ friends, others I only now had a chance to get acquainted with after having long wanted to. For knowing one British university is a far cry from knowing them all: if they are si- milar in some respects, in others each has its own method of fulfill- ing its mission. Which is very much in keeping with the British charact- er, ethos, and tradition and the British way of combining a pro- pensity for unity with a taste for the expression of differences. The University of London is perhaps more like a Continental university than like Oxford or like Cambridge, which so much resembles the old Scottish St. Andrews. In turn, the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow seem, like London, to re- semble universities of the type of PAG. 10 oe or not to be” of a new kind and new dimensions. But not all seem- ed thus disoriented by automation, Sir Edward Appleton, for example, contemplates the problem with tranquil optimism. I was also to find this optimism among the Germans, though Germany has its share of uneasy Hamlets perplexed by. the problems that the super- technical development of civiliza- tion is raising. It is necessary un- easiness. Excessive optimism has never been, by itself, a good coun- sellor. The restles, are needed too if problems are to be confronted in their full com- plexity One tendency seemed to me dominant in Europe today; a re- pudiation of the old simplification of human problems into someth- ing solvable by the con- ventional “isms.” Not only liberal- ism but socialism itself, in all its forms from the English to the Rus- sian, seeks new solutions, There is the consciousness of a need for them, the certainty that socialism — Communist socialism like that of Russia, Labor socialism like that party achieved in Britain, democ- ratie socialism like that practiced in the Scandinavian countries — represents less a triumph than a failure. Not, of course, a total fail- ure, like those solutions called Fas- cist and Nazi, but a sufficiently serious one to give political and industrial leaders the right and the responsibility to search, togeth- er with sociologists, psychologists, economists, religious leaders, and farm leaders, for new approaches to the problems of human society in an increasingly automatized ci- vilization. I heard more than one Europ- ean social scientist voice the wish that European governments would imitate the United- States by re- garding the collaboration of these specialists as important. But in fact. it is already apparent, sometimes strikingly, in modern European ci- ty planning and in the rebuilding of bombed areas in Germany, Brit- ain, and the Netherlands. For ex- ample, there are new German apartment buildings with one- room-and-kitchenette apartments set aside for widows, numerous in countries devastated by the war — a measure that forestalls quarrels, caused by-the presence of two wo- men in a single kitchen, in the households where they would otherwise live. In the same way, an attempt is made to provide a certain independence for old peo- ple sharing the homes of children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews. Another thing: special care is tak- en — perhaps superior to that or- dinarily taken in U. S., and cer- tainly in Brazilian, city planning — in the placing of tall buildings, which are required to be widely separated. Which shows that the architect does not receive absolute freedom: he is bound by the urban or regional plan, part of a whole. And more and more this whole is the work not only of engineers or town planners but also of sociolog- ists and psychologists, in order that the new or rebuilt cities should the men, women, and who will live in them children Reprinted from AMERICAS monthly magazine published by the Pam American Union ia English, Spanish and Portu- guese, By GILBERTO FREYRE I found the same preoccupation among the researchers engaged in regional planning studies at the Frankfurt Sociographic Institute — they were particularly attentive to the problems of the various farming areas and of the relation- ships between these areas and the cities — and among the sociolog- ists of the Institute of Political Science of the University of Ber- lin, where problems of government and administration are examined not only from. the specifically po- litical but also from the sociologic- al viewpoint. In short, one senses among the Europeans of today the beginnings of a healthy reaction against raw specialization and sheer technique in favor of a comprehensiveness giving due importance to man — total man, not economic man. Evi- dent in Britain, the Netherlands, France, it is most outstanding in On their trip, Dr. and Mrs. Freyre were entertained at dinner in typical German home. Social awareness molds German planning: redevelopment project for bombed area of Berlin, designed for 1957 International Building Exhibition. Hostel housing scheme at Munich, designed for communal living, offers individual privacy and isolation from city noise. Le Corbusier apartments, built in beautiful garden-like surroundings. HEMISPHERE « SUNDAY, JUNE 9, 195