With Atheists Like Him, Who Needs Believers?

A Remarkably Contemporary Interview (from 1970) with I. F. Stone

OF ALL the idols in my personal pantheon, Isidore Feinstein Stone (1907-1989), proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, is one of the most durable. Rock musicians, novelists, even theo­logians who once had a place in my shrine have been dismissed, their clay feet exposed to my disap­pointed eyes.

Not I. F.

For this short, gruff man unquestionably was in my view the greatest, toughest­ minded and hardest-working journalist in America. And possibly one of the most honestly humble.

That’s partly because it is certain that he would be embarrassed to read such extravagant praise of himself in the public press (or now, a blog).

The opportunity to interview Stone came  unexpectedly.

Actually I almost ran into him, one day in 1970, amid the crowded, creeping traffic of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I drove slowly around the corner onto Brattle Street, and nearly bumped into a short, bespectacled man making his careful way to the curb.

He glanced through thick glasses in my direction as I squeaked to a stop. I recognized him with an electric gasp, as if he had been all the Beatles rolled into one.
It was him! It was really him!

It was I. F. Stone!

Heedless of other cars or police bearing traffic tickets, I yanked on the parking brake, leaped from the car, left it blocking a lane and called his name

The upshot was an intense hour of conversation over a muffin, and a souvenir more precious than George Harrison’s autograph: an agreement that he would give me an exclusive interview, if I came to Washington soon. I even had his phone number.

For those who are asking, “Who was I. F. Stone?”  here’s a thumbnail: Stone was then the embodiment of independent, fearless radical journalism, an honest-to-breathing living legend.

When the leftist daily paper he wrote for had folded in 1952, he took his savings, combined it with a strong work ethic and a relentless suspicion of official lies and launched I. F. Stone’s Weekly.

It was a four-page digest of the digging he did all over the capital for nuggets of fact, important, unclassified, but neglected, ignored or submerged in the capital swamps (there was always plenty of it). His reports were presented carefully and accurately, but with an unabashed independent leftist tilt.

When I first subscribed, he still charged only five dollars a year for it, and had enough subscribers (60,000+; not much for the internet age, but a lot then) to sustain him and his wife Esther.

By hook and by crook, I was soon across a table from him at a public cafeteria, scribbling notes and likely taping our conversation. The interview was a major feature in The Christian Century’s issue November 4, 1970. (This version is a bit expanded from that.)

Q. How did your weekly get started?

Stone: I was already a columnist and commentator as well as a reporter, and I worked for a series of radical New York papers.

Q. Can you tell me a little about those papers?

Sure. There was PM, which was started in 1939 as an experiment, which lasted until 1946. After 1946 PM became the New York Star, then the New York Daily Compass, and then it died in No­vember 1952.

Q. What killed it?

It just really wasn’t a viable idea; not enough people would support it. There were lots of people talking about wanting a liberal daily paper, but they didn’t support it. So it got smaller and smaller, with diminishing returns. It was a bad time then, of course, and I couldn’t get a job doing and saying what I wanted to say, and so I started my own little fleabite publication.

Q. What was your initial circulation?

I had about 5,300 – just enough to manage.

Q. What has been the pattern of circulation growth? It’s shot up pretty rapidly in the past few years, hasn’t it?

Yes, I just finished my report to the post office; it’s my dreariest annual chore. And I discovered to my amazement that I was up 30 per cent over last year and 50 per cent over two years ago. I thought when I went biweekly I’d lose readers, but I didn’t. One reason is just natural momentum, and then too a thing like this somehow catches on. At first I was being accused of all sorts of evil things which I didn’t do, and now I get credit for things I never did. So that sort of works out.

Q. Most recent feature articles about you and the Weekly have concentrated on your position and work as an independent journalist. I’d like to ask you about the philosophy, the beliefs that underlie it, and their development.

Well, ultimately every policy and every choice, every philosophy and every decision rests on a faith. You get to a point where the choices you make are based not on something you can prove, but on something you deeply believe. In a sense a lot of fundamental choices are really aesthetic: they in­volve our sense of harmony, our sense of balance….

I grew up in an all-gentile town; we were one of only two Jewish families, so I never had much formal religious training. I was a bar mitzvah, but I became an atheist shortly afterwards.

Q. How did that happen?

It came out of a very peculiar set of circum­stances. I had read Jack London’s Martin Eden; it was one of the first books that began to make a radical out of me. I don’t remember much about the book now, but I first heard of Darwin and Herbert Spencer in it.

There weren’t many people in our town who read books, as in most small towns. But there was a lady artist there, and I discovered some­ how that she had a copy of Spencer’s First Princi­ples, so I asked to borrow it. Shortly afterward I came home from school one afternoon to the store we ran, and my mother said, “Mrs. Rose was around here today, she was asking about some book you wanted to borrow and she seemed to think that maybe you were an invalid.”

It turned out that what she really asked my mother was whether I was an infidel, and was it all right to let me read Herbert Spencer? Mother had assured her that I was quite strong, certainly not an “invalid,” and so it was all right for me to read Herbert Spencer.

I recall Spencer only dimly now, but I remember that there were two parts to his book. The first was “The Unknowable,” and the second was “The Knowable.” In the “Unknowable” part Spencer discussed the question of God, and reached the conclusion that the most rational position about the matter was the agnostic position.

But I felt that the atheist position was the most rational, and that Spencer was wrong. I’ve always felt there’s no way to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of the kind of God that is envisaged in Western reli­gions.

Q. Were you particularly affected by the genocide of World War II?

Well, you don’t have to go to such tremendous dramatic effects as a holocaust; one child born with­out an arm, or blind, is enough. It shakes the whole foundations of heaven.

I got some insight into this problem once when I was talking to U Thant, who is a deeply religious man. When I asked him about the problem of evil, he explained to me that for an Indian or a Burmese, whose religion did not postulate an anthropomorph­ic deity at all, the problem of evil did not arise. You didn’t have a benevolent, or presumably benev­olent, deity.

To attribute to a presumably benevo­lent deity the creation of a world full of evil and cruelty and horror just seems to me the ultimate blasphemy. I feel that atheism is the only pious position you can reach. I don’t think Western theol­ogy has any answer to the whole problem of evil – at least none that I ever came across or heard about that’s satisfactory.

Q. You weren’t impressed with the Book of Job?

Well, Job was wonderful, but it doesn’t real­ly … I’ll have to reread Job. I reread it a couple of years ago, and I didn’t think it really had an answer.

You know, what Marx said about religion being the opium of the people, I think has been misunder­stood by many people. I don’t think he said it as a sneer. I think that for humble people it is an opiate in the sense that it gives them comfort and solace, and why shouldn’t they have it? I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t.

It seems to me that religion justifies itself best for the poor and humble; the great see it in a very different light. In Roman times, religion for ordinary people was very simple, but for somebody like Lucretius it was metaphori­cal, symbolic, a kind of secret code by which to unravel the mystery of the universe. In De Rerum Natura he writes about Venus in the arms of Mars and it’s just magnificent, the gods and goddesses become very real. But for him they were metaphori­cal.

The same thing is true for most religious systems: simple people take them very literally, and other people take them as metaphorical, and within the same system of religion you have very diverse inter­pretations of the same creeds.

I used to be a church editor when I was a young reporter, and I used to get paid two and a half dollars a sermon for covering church services. This was while I was still going to school.

Q. That should have been enough to make an atheist out of anybody.

No, to tell the truth I got to know many of the ministers very well, and most of them were really better than most of the people in their towns, they really were. Bad as it was that they had to get up once a week and play on the religious sentiments of their congregations, they were more thoughtful, more … they were nice people. I liked them, and they liked me.

In fact it got so I never went to church at all. I’d just call up and ask them what they were going to say, and they’d tell me to fix it up so it would make a good story, and I’d help them figure out something that would make a good headline, and they trusted me not to distort what they had to say.

And it got so I could cover three or four sermons on Sunday without doing more than making a few phone calls. But I liked most of the ministers that I met, and I met a lot of them. Most of them were prisoners of their congregations; almost all of them would have liked to say much more or do much more. They’re sort of like editorial writers on newspapers: editors worry about the advertisers, and ministers worry about their contributors. It’s just that simple.

Q. But if you’re so skeptical of organized religion, how come that in the September 7 (1970) issue of your paper I catch you quoting Isaiah, obviously very impressed with him – and not just impressed, but moved. How do you get from here to there? What about the prophets?

I suppose . . . I suppose I’m really basically very religious, even though I’m an atheist. I’m within the Jewish tradition, though I don’t believe in God in any conventional sense. And in the prophets you have the very best of Judaism. They’re . . . well, in a very lofty way, they were sort of like radical journalists in their time, rushing around exposing evils, interrupting people and getting in dutch.

But Isaiah – Isaiah is just sublime. I mean, my Hebrew’s not very good, but it’s enough so that with the English translation I can work it out. On my vacation last August I had a lot of time, and I read Isaiah very patiently and conscientiously and it was very rewarding. It’s magnificent, sublime poet­ry, and it’s full of wonderful insights. There are supposed to be three Isaiahs, but I couldn’t decide which one was more wonderful. All three are mar­velous.

Q. But I don’t see how the Hebrew prophets, who aren’t a totally unique religious phenomenon, fit into the picture of religion that you’ve drawn. They didn’t uphold the establishment or spend their time giving solace to the humble. When Jeremiah went around Jerusalem telling the people to surrender to the Babylonians, he wasn’t saying something that comforted the poor, or the rich either. In fact, he wasn’t even comforting himself.

Well, I haven’t read Jeremiah that closely. Isaiah is the prophet of reconciliation, and today, particularly in terms of what’s happening in the Middle East, what he said seems to me terribly relevant. There’s that wonderful prophecy of his about a high road that would go from Assyria through Israel to Egypt and reconcile all three, bring peace among them. He said “Zion shall be redeemed by justice.”

And to me that’s the solution to the whole problem: justice for the Arab refugees, at least some measure of justice. It’s hard to have absolute justice in the world because so much of the conflict of the world is conflict between rights, conflict between brothers.

For example, what was justice in the Nigerian conflict? How could you reconcile the terrible persecution of the lbos with the terrible feeling of the Housas that this very clever tribe was taking over the government? It’s like two children quarreling in a schoolyard: it’s very hard to decide who’s right, there’s right on both sides.

There are very few situations where absolute justice is attainable; usually it’s not only unattain­able, but even the search for it could become very dangerous, very inhuman. What’s absolute justice in Ulster, for example, between the Catholic minority and the fear of the Protestant majority that they might be subjected to a Catholic rule in which church and state would be united? There are real fears on both sides.

There are real fears on both sides, genuine and justified fears, in the Middle East. So all you can hope for is a reconciliation based on some measure of justice to both sides. And Isaiah is really the prophet of that kind of approach; as you read him, he just becomes terribly relevant and terribly contemporary.

Q. But I still want to press you about Isaiah, because it seems that whatever sort of religious experience he represents, it doesn’t fit into any kind of reductionist or “opiate-of-the-people” bag.

Well, look: in trying to understand anything, you have to realize that the same phenomenon can be understood in many different ways and can yield fresh insights every time.

And the view of religion held by simple people is one view of it; it gives them solace, and why shouldn’t they have solace?

I may have told you about my grandmother. For her, religion was very personal. She just talked to God, she mumbled her prayers, and it wasn’t anything very elevated, it was very sweet and pious and natural. She was just a simple person and what she believed was that God was somebody you talked to twice a day.

But Isaiah represents the activism that, to me, is particularly attractive in the Jewish tradition. It seems to me Judaism is a religion that isn’t so much concerned with an afterlife as with a man’s duty in this one, and with concern for others and a better social order.

I think Judaism is an activist religion, concerned with building a better life here. Whereas, say, in the great Eastern faiths people flee from the world – that’s the whole idea of nirvana. Those religions really reflect a social background of enormous complexity and despair. India has been inexorably overpopulated for millennia. People just had to find ways to escape from all that suffering. But Judaism at its best is not a religion of escape.

And that’s what Isaiah represents – a real activism. When Nietzsche spoke of Christianity as a slave religion, there was some truth in it psychologically, in that you bore your burden in this life without complaint and you were going to get your reward in the hereafter. The  Wobblies  talked about “pie in the sky,” and that was out of Nietzsche.

I’m not saying this to insult Christianity. One of my other passions is Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), whom I’ve been reading with enormous admiration and as a real religious experience.

He was an extraordinary person (a German philosopher, theologian, Catholic cleric, jurist, mathematician and astronomer): a Roman Catholic cardinal toward the close of the Middle Ages, an administrator of the church, very busy with its affairs, and yet a great scholar and a really great mystic, a man of humane views which were far beyond his time. His dialogues in the Pace Fidei don’t teach just tolerance for other faiths but assert that, since God is unknowable, every faith somehow adds to our understanding of the mystery. It wasn’t a matter of tolerating other faiths, but rather of seeing through their spectacles too the unknowability of God. It’s a very lofty conception for a Roman Catholic cardinal in the so-called dark ages.

Q. It’s pretty lofty for some people in 1970.

Well, I don’t say that to disparage him. But how does all this relate to today? Today we have a whole list of problems, but really we just have one big interlocked problem. Take urban blight, pollu­tion, education, racism – these are all interlocked. You can’t really deal with these things separately without wasting a lot of effort and driving people to despair. We need to deal with them by way of some overall plan or package. How? Well, if by some magic you could raise the level of altruism in ordi­nary human beings by 30 per cent, it would change the whole picture. If you could just change the level of concern for others, we would all be saved.

Q. At divinity school we call that grace.

But even when you tell people, “Look, you’re breathing the same air, you’re drinking the same polluted water, and your investments are being ruined by the same urban blight and you’re threat­ened by all this” – still they’d rather go and buy another color television or move a little farther out in the suburbs.  We really don’t know enough about the nature of man, as an individual or as a social being.

This whole conception of the “economic man” that’s basic to both capitalism and communism is quite inadequate. The idea that people know their economic interests and are moved by them is a figment of 19th century rationalism. For Adam Smith’s side it’s the individual that counts, for Marx it’s the class.

But they’re equally illusory, because as you observe people you see that, first, they don’t very often know what their interests are. Second, they usually prefer their short-range to their long­ range interests. Third, they prefer their comforts to their interests. If you disturb their customary ways and habits, they’re furious. They’d much rather go on smoking a cigarette; tell them that they’re going to die of lung cancer in 30 years – well, maybe they will, but they’d rather enjoy that smoke. They’re prisoners of habits and institutions and customary ways.

And those are things that are hard to break them out of. But if everyone were as concerned as, say, a handful of our best Quakers are, the whole country would be transformed overnight.

This is what I mean when I say that the basic problems are really moral, in the sense that if you could change people’s moral attitudes, then you could solve these economic and political problems much more easily.

And to me that’s basically a very Jewish point of view. If I could make the Jews more sensitive to the in justice suffered by the Arabs, it would be much, much easier to negotiate a peaceful settlement of their situation.

Q. Do you get a lot of critical feedback about your position on the Middle East?

Yeah, sure.

Q. What kind?

Oh, I get silly hate letters, cancellations. People tell me I’m guilty of self-hatred. That’s one thing I don’t suffer from, self-hatred. I don’t hate myself as a Jew, and I don’t hate myself any other way.

If it’s part of my job to help make American white people more sensitive to the feelings of our minorities, I don’t see why it’s any different for me as a Jew to try to make Jews more sensitive to the feelings of the Arabs with whom Israel and the Jews have to deal. Again, this is what I mean by saying the problem is basically moral: you try to raise peo­ple’s consciousness of the fact that’s expressed some­where in the Gospels, that we’re all “parts of one another.”

It’s a very profound remark, and to raise people’s consciousness of it would make it so much easier to deal with so many problems.

Q. In the September 7 (1970) issue, while talking about terrorism in this country, you seem to be rather discouraged not only about the progress of your enterprise but about the general trend of events.

[Chuckles] I’m not worried about my enter­prise; it’s doing quite well. I am worried about the United States, for the first time in my life. I think it’s a great country; I think the American people are a great people, I think they’re in many ways a very good and kind people. But I think they’re not too well informed, and I think we’re in a terrible period in which the orbit of government is so much wider than it was 50 years ago.

What I mean is that so many complicated, abstruse technical questions are now in the realm of public policy. How does a person who has to make his living driving a bus or delivering the mail or running a store – how does he have time to study the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] or southeast Asia or education or the arms race?

It’s hard enough for those of us who make our living as so-called experts in public affairs. And what are people to do who earn their living in a different way – how do they exercise their rights and duties as citizens? Every four years two people come before them and each is supposed to symbolize – something.

What? How does one man’s appearance offer you a choice on such a swarm of complex questions? It’s really very difficult, and what are people to do? I’m plenty confused myself.

Q. But if this is the first time you’ve really been afraid for the nation, isn’t there more to your feeling than just a perception of the complexity of the issues? Public affairs have been pretty compli­cated for a long time.

I’m afraid the country is just liable to fall apart. And one thing we learned from the rise of fascism is how fragile civilization is and how easy it is to uncork all kinds of horrors. Man is so close to savagery and civilization is so thin that if respect for law and order really breaks down, you’re not going to have utopia, you’ll have anarchy and terrible problems.

We’re also beginning to see that the basic prob­lems of the world are universal problems which have not been solved by any system of society. There’s no easy push-button way to deal with them anymore.

When I was a boy I thought pollution was some­ thing that socialism would never have, and we wouldn’t have to worry about it if we got rid of production for profit. But the Soviet Union has just as much pollution as we have. The story of Lake Baikal is a tremendous testimony to the fact that you can have pollution, industrial waste, careless­ness and indifference just as much on the part of industrial managers as on the part of corporate owners.

Racism is a problem everywhere. Look at the anti­-Semitism in Russia and Poland or the tribalism in Africa. I’m saying this only to suggest that if we can realize how deep-rooted these problems are, maybe we could be a little more patient with each other.

You know, in some ways the extreme radical kids here are terribly American, because we live in a successful technological civilization in which so many problems have been solved by finding some new device or gadget. If the old icebox doesn’t work, you buy a new Frigidaire –  that sort of thing.

And if your society doesn’t work, why you scrap it, get a new gadget and tomorrow everything’s okay. The moving man delivers a new thing, he hooks it up, he puts it in, the power runs and everything’s fine; I mean, what’s all the fuss about? Just blow it up and buy a new one – and do it on the installment plan! Utopia in ten easy payments!

I don’t blame the kids for being frustrated, be­ cause what frustrates kids everywhere in the world is the terrible immobilism of the bureaucracy, the establishment. But in a way, what their revolt is against is man himself. And one of the dangers in that is that perfectionism can be a horror.

In some ways, without meaning to, the extreme radicals really hate man, because man is imperfect, he’s not very efficient, he’s not very good, he’s all mixed up, and that’s why things are so bad. I don’t mean that the framework of a society isn’t important for human survival; it certainly is. But people built that framework, and the attitudes toward it I’m talking about are really anti-human.

I spoke to a group of college editors just before the Chicago Convention, and I told them that the situation was really very simple, that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved by the elimination of technology and man. And we’ll probably solve them that way – by blowing ourselves up.

I don’t mean to be depressing, but it helps to clarify the problem when we realize the dimensions of what we’re dealing with. We all know about the animals that flourished before the Ice Age but couldn’t change their habits when conditions changed, and so they didn’t survive.

When an ani­mal has to change its habits very severely it usually can’t. It may be that man and human society are incapable of the kind of changes that are required by our enormous technological progress. We’re trapped by it.

To combat these problems, somebody has got to kick up a fuss to get attention. And it’s amazing how much fuss people can kick up without getting much attention. But on the other hand it’s also necessary to preserve some modicum of patience, and some modicum of forgiving and feeling – after all, we’re dealing with fellow human beings, not monsters.

A Black Panther made a speech in Philadelphia re­cently, and he said it was all right to kill “the pigs” because they weren’t human. Well, this is the oldest war cry of the human race! In every war you assume that the enemy is subhuman, that he’s not your brother and it’s all right to kill him. On the other hand, you assume that in some diabolical way he’s superhuman, so it’s necessary to kill him.

Q. If a group of disenchanted American students were to ask you to serve as a consultant to help them plan strategy for making some changes, what kind of advice would you give them? If throwing bombs is no good, what else is there to do? Should we all go work for peace candidates? What sorts of things do you see that really need doing that aren’t being done?

I don’t know. I don’t know what the answers are anymore. I’m against violence, but it’s very hard to tell the oppressed not to be a little bit violent, because if they aren’t a little bit violent nobody will pay any attention to them. Even as it is, look at all the terrible things that have happened in our cities, and the white majority still pays very little attention to the blacks’ and Chicanos’ problems.

For a free society to work requires extremists as well as moderates. Everybody plays his part in what some might call God’s great plan, except that it’s not a very good plan. Without the extremists, the moderates won’t have much leverage; but if the extremists go too far —

I think the oppressed can’t afford to be reasonable, but they can’t afford to be irrational either. And where to draw the line be­tween the unreasonable and the irrational, I’m not bright enough to know.

Q. I read in another article about you and the Bi-Weekly that you said you were thinking about retiring in about eight years, when you would be 75.

Seventy-five in  eight years? What are you rushing me for? I’m not 67.

Q. I’m sorry. How old are you then?

Well, I tell the kids I’ve barely reached 30 for the second time. And I just said to that reporter offhandedly that I might retire when I reach 70.

Q. Do you look beyond that? Old reporters, I suppose, never die, they just — what do they do?

I don’t know what they do. I’d like to go off and spend five years looking at my umbilicus and doing deep breathing, trying to figure out what it’s all about. I feel more and more ignorant, because I don’t have any answers anymore. It’s pretty awful to run a publication that’s supposed to supply people with answers and not have any answers. It’s therapeutic for me, but I don’t know whether it does anybody else any good or not.

Q. So it all comes back to faith, I guess, atheism or not. Thank you very much.