Man's Aspiration Similar Everywhere Soc. Rel. Lecturer Finds in Survey

In these past five years of bickering at the United Nations, armament races, and talk about a third world war, Charles Morris, lecturer in Social Relations, has been travelling around the globe trying to prove that mankind does want peace.

Since 1948 Morris--aided by UNESCO--has collected data from college students in nine nations in order to discover an underlying similarity of thought and aspiration in the great cultural systems.

"If we took the problem of human values as seriously as we take the atomic bomb," Morris says, "we could go places very fast."

Using as his subjects students from the United States--including about 100 from Harvard--Norway, Canada, England, Italy, Pakistan, China, India, and Japan. Morris worked with a battery of interviews, questionaires, sometotyping and projective tests to show that there are definite similarities in the ways that different people want to live.

There are indeed differences, Morris admits, but he stresses the fact that these differences are decreasing as time goes on. He feels that the nations of the world are working towards the same thing, the "intergral man", and that only the proper push is needed to set them working together.

The main part of Morris's study was a questionaire listing 13 ways of living which the students were to rate on the proximity to their "life ideals".

These ways of living were based on the three concepts of "dependence, dominance, and detachment" which Morris feels are the basic attidudes that a human being can take to the world in which he lives.

"While there are no alternatives to these attidudes, each can take many forms and have many degrees of strength, and they can be combined with each other in innumerable ways," Morris says.

He found that all of the 13 ways to live were given first choice by some students in all cultures, and in each culture a number of the ways to live were well liked.

Certain of the choices, however, were preffered more strongly in some cultures than in others.

"In India it was the way that stressed the preservation of the best that man has attained; in Japan the ways that stressed sympathetic concern for other persons and stoical self-control; in China the ways that stressed identification with the group for the achievement of social goals and letting oneself be an instrument of the great powers at work in the world."

In the United States, however, the great proportion of students stressed the necessity for "a dynamic integration of diversity."

But Morris also found that this "life ideal", which combines the attitudes of dependance, dominance, and detachment, was among the top choices of all other cultures.

Through somatotyping, he also discovered that people with similar physiques in different nations have essentially the same desires and outlooks on life.

"In the light of these facts," Morris says, "it seems reasonable to conclude that in the choice of life-ideals by present-day college students, the traditional contrast of East and West simply does not hold.

"There is a strong common demand for an abundant psychological life which has place for dependence, dominance, and detachment and which finds its unity in the dynamic integration of diversities."

The relative difference in attitudes and actions between nations is not due to differences in their basic beliefs, he feels, but because each nation underwent a different historical development which molded its ideology in a distinctive manner.

These differences are changing even now. In recent centuries, the Orient has stressed dependance and detachment more than the Occident, but now the East has taken possession of the power techniques of the West, and is adopting much of Western ideology.

He also believes that Western man is beginning to protest against the "specialized and one-sided creation he has made of himself in recent centuries.

Pilot Light

Although his study has produced some definitive results, Morris stresses the fact that this work can only act as a pilot study. He has been able to isolate various patterns of values but he feels that there is a lot more to be done.

"Right now the methods I used in the study are more important than the results."

Nonetheless, he does feel that his project has proven one important fact that the nations of the world should regard before they take any drastic steps.

"Here in the deepest sense, in the movement toward integral man, is the convergence in world outlooks which is now taking place. It is supported in both East and West by cultural tradition and by present-day aspirations. It is within this great process that we as nations and as individuals now have to find our place."