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REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

a. Research, Integrated Thinking, and War

Scholars, colleges, universities, and research agencies all over
the world need to join their intellectual and spiritual resources in
research and make specialized and integrated studies of the problems
whose social consequences reach around the world and down the ages.
The World War and the world economic depression have taken their
toll in human lives, human well-beings and happiness beyond measure-
ment or imagination. Wars and depression throw their cruel and
sinister shadows across the homes of the people on all the continents
of this earth. We, who, in our scientific pride, consider that we have
mastered the earth, stand baffled in the midst of these two mighty
foes of every locality and all mankind. The very fact of recurring
wars and recurring depressions raises a question as to the quality of
our education and the sincerity of our religion. The people in a world
in which such depressions and wars can recur are not yet intellectual
and spiritual in the control of their institutions. The nature of the
wars and depressions illustrates the complex structure of life and the
world. They make necessary greater depths in specialization and a
new integration of old and new knowledge in all fields for a better
understanding of the problems and the processes of solution. The
explanation that war is caused by economic interests is too simple to
be true to the complex nature of human beings and human society.
The human being carries around as part of his structure and heritage
biological, psychological, anthropological, historical, economic, politi-
cal, philosophical, and spiritual equipment. Human society is as
complex as the human life implicated in its framework. Wars may
come from springs deep in the structure of human beings or deep in the
structure of human society or in both. It is the heroic task of biology,
psychology, and all the social sciences to try to light up the origins
of war and work out its social control and abolition. On the surface it
is clear that science and technology have with power engines, farms,
factories, stores, banks, ocean lanes, rails, cables and concrete roads,
flung across the earth the mechanical framework of a mighty economic
structure. A pistol shot in remote Serajevo or a stock market crash in
Wall Street causes repercussions around the world. A Slavic student,
in killing a German Archduke, precipitated national antagonisms,
imperial ambitions, economic rivalries, and released the human passions
and the dynamic energies of the peoples of two hemispheres which