The Aphorisms of Merle Kling - by Arnold Kling
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.
