“EMOTIONAL BLAH”

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 14 September 1935, Page 4

“EMOTIONAL BLAH”

“Wisdom Filtered through False Teeth and White Whiskers”

STUDENTS’PEACE BALLOT . . . V. OPENING OF THE CAMPAIGN WELLINGTON, To-day. “You are the people who, if there is war, are going to he concerned. ' You are going to be shot long before any member of Parliament. . . And I am very far from believing that all the wisdom in the world has got to be filtered through false teeth and a crop of white whiskers." Thus, Dr C. El. Boeby, Executive Officer oi’ the New Zealand Council for ivducatiional Research, and formerly acting-professor of philosophy at Canterbury University College, launched the campaign for the peace ballot at Victoria University College, Wellington, last night as part of a nationwide poll among University students. The president of the New Zealand University Students’ Association, Mr R. J. Larkin, presided. There had been peace ballots before, and the idea wap nothing new, Dr. Beeby said, in mentioning the very successful ballot conducted recently by the League of Nations Union of Great Britain. “We live in a democracy which is not a.perfect form of democracy. If we lived under an autocracy, what we think would not matter the proverbial tin of fish. And if the Government were run in very close connection with public opinion, it would not be necessary. It would not be necessary in a democracy like the Athenian.” When an important decision had to be made a plebiscite was a very clumsy way of getting it. NOT OVER-EMPHASISED While recognising that the importance of the student ballot should not oe over-emphasised,'Dr Beeby said that at the same time the students should not feel diffident about it, and went on to say that if there were war they would be the people who would be concerned. Another thing that must not be assumed was that the student view would be typical of that of the community. If that were so, it would show that their education had been wasted. “One thing the ballot should represent is the extent to which human beings are capable of rational thinking,” he said. He had been reading that day a “Workers’ Weekly.” It was full of slogans. That was true, generally. We were always thinking in terms of slogans and catch words. “Don’t think that you can sit down in the fish-like coldness of the mathematician and think the question out. You have got to think it out in a real world full of all sorts of emotional currents and -cross-currents. \But if the students can offer anything, it is a certain rational attitude. You are supposed to have trained minds, whatever those may be.”

NATIONAL EMERGENCY Again, Dr. Beebv said, they were not to think the opinions they would express they would stick to in a national emotional emergency. But reason would then probably have a better chance of determining judgment when the crisis came. “If the ballot does nothing else—and it will do much more—than pin you down to putting statements on paper and thinking them out it will have been something worth while.. It will take a certain amount of intellectual courage to answer seme of those questions “Yes” or “No”--the courage of facing up to extraordinarily difficult situations. Everybody but the shareholder in an armament firm who supports war is a damn fool, but whether they will take certain steps to oppose war in certain circumces is a different matter. “Take a look back at your answers in ten or twenty years, when you have shares in armaments or wool or Imperal Chemical Industries, and put your hands on your hearts and ask which is the more honest man. If war is going to be stopped it is probably going to be stopped by the younger •generation, and if so it should he by people of institutions like ours.” INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY Another value of the ballot, Dr. Beeby said, would be of sheer intellectual curiosity; .to determine perhaps what made the student militarist or pacifist—the economic class from which he came, his education, or any other factor.

“If yon want to control the attitudes of people in the future so that they will be able to see through all the emotional blah about ‘fighting to make the world safe for democracy,’ and ‘to make a world fit for heroes to live in,’ you want to know how 'much conditions, school life, affected your attitudes. Behind the whole thing we want to know how you people will differ from the man in the street. We have got to think of this whole problem as intellectual, but not only as that, and as one that may influence the youth of the country.’’ Plans for conducting the ballot were completed. It will commence in Victoria College on Monday and conclude at the end of the month. The results are to be analysed by Dr. Beeby.