The Aphorisms of Merle Kling

His three iron laws of social science, and other sayings

Frequent commenter John Alcorn suggested this topic.

Humans are Violent

Merle Kling (1919 - 2008) often said that man was born with two arms, two legs, and and a drive to engage in conflict.¹ He saw racial conflict in America and religious conflict in the Middle East as intractable.

His field was political science, and among other things he studied revolutionary violence in Latin America. He noted that the typical coup in Latin America constituted a relatively peaceful transfer of power, with the new junta not making any fundamental changes. Real revolutions took place only after more violence had occurred. Dramatic political change occurs if and only if it has been preceded by a great deal of violence.

His pessimistic view of human nature is understandable, given that his formative years coincided with the rise of Communism, Hitler, and the Second World War. After the war, he said that he would like to see the Cold War settled by a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union to see which side’s nuclear weapons could destroy Germany first.

In the war, his army service was in Polynesia, not near the enemy. But enough of his comrades were disabled by insect-borne parasites that he reached the rank of master sergeant. The army’s vocational testing found such a discrepancy between his high verbal aptitude and his low mechanical aptitude that they thought he had faked the mechanical aptitude test. He hadn’t.

He was born with reddish brown hair, but I only knew him as bald. Once I lost my hair, my facial resemblance to him became uncanny.

He was almost six feet tall. I was constantly told that I would have a growth spurt and catch up to him, but that did not happen, and I remained at 5’3”. That was a source of frustration for me. On the other hand, I could run circles around him. In softball, the only position he could play was first base. He taught himself to switch-hit, as did I. But I was too small to be useful in major sports, and walking on my hands became my best athletic skill.

Corkball and the Two Cultures

As a youngster, he played a lot of corkball. This is a St. Louis variation on baseball, sort of like stickball in other cities. Each team consisted of just two players. It was still popular when I was growing up, and I played it a lot, too.

Corkball was one of his favorite metaphors in giving talks. He often said that “We will have to pay people to play corkball.” He was predicting that many jobs would be made obsolete by technology, and society would have to find a way to deal with widespread unemployment.

Among the people he thought destined to play corkball were the literary intellectuals like himself. The essay that gave him the greatest pride was The Intellectual: Will He Wither Away?, published in The New Republic in 1957. It anticipated The Two Cultures, a famous set of lectures given by C.P. Snow, on the tension between scholars of the humanities and what we now refer to as STEM, or even tech bro’ culture. When he sent a copy of his article to Snow, Snow graciously included an acknowledgment in the published version of the lectures.

He foresaw that the pure humanities scholar would grow to feel alienated and resentful in the modern world. My father put it,

His technical incompetence paralyzes his capacity for insight. As novelist, therefore, he ignores the dynamic economy which he cannot fathom

He pointed out that where novelists once depicted the world of the factory or economic striving, they no longer knew enough of the modern business world to be able to write about it. Think of the subject matter of most novels today, which primarily concern personal relationships.

My father knew that “paying people to play corkball” (or what we now would call a Universal Basic Income) would not solve the problem of loss of status among people who were no longer valued in a modern economy. Had he lived to see the recent trends in angry social justice activism, he would not have been surprised that non-STEM academic types are at the forefront.

Three Iron Laws of Social Science

He never wrote down what I consider his most important insight. Merle Kling’s Three Iron Laws of Social Science are:

1. Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.

2. The data are insufficient.

3. The methodology is flawed

It was the ironic First Iron Law that he cited the most. Whenever a generalization in psychology or sociology or politics came up, and someone would bring up an exception, he would pipe up, “First Iron Law!”

A more personal variation of the First Iron Law that he told me was, “Daddy is not always right. And Daddy is not always wrong.” Intellectual humility was very central to his outlook.

Another piece of parental wisdom that he offered was, “Honesty is the best policy, unless you’ve got a sure thing.” And he would add “There is no sure thing.”

He never owned a house in the suburbs with a lawn. He would say that “As Marx put it, capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.”

The Political Science Department

He spent almost his entire career at Washington University. He was in the political science department, and many of his sayings came from other members of the department. That was where he heard and passed on the joke:

What’s the difference between a lady and a diplomat?

If a lady says no, she means maybe. If she says maybe, she means yes. And if she says yes, then she is no lady.

If a diplomat says yes, then he means maybe. If he says maybe, then he means no. And if he says no, then he is no diplomat.

Another political science joke was about the difference between capitalism and Communism. “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, it’s the other way around.”

They used the phrase “the entomologist and the beetle” to express their desire to not go into politics. After all, entomologists do not seek to become beetles.

The professors made up a game that they called legomachy. Take a paragraph from a high-sounding political speech. Cut out each of the big words and put them on cards. Shuffle the cards, and put them back in the paragraph. If the new paragraph sounds the same, then this proves that the paragraph actually says nothing. The point is simply to evoke emotions.

Symbolic Politics

He influenced and was influenced by Murray Edelman, who wrote The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Its thesis was that politicians in a democracy would engage in highly ritualized, symbolic conflicts. Merle Kling’s interpretation was that this allowed political insiders to get what they wanted, while the masses had their attention distracted by the symbolic battles. With his dark view of human nature, he thought this was much better than the alternative of violent conflict.

1. His social security card and his passport had two different birth years. One of them listed 1918, but 1919 seems more consistent with genealogical research on the Fainsod family, with which he was related.