Reading your friendly letter and the articles you sent me back in 1987 has given me a chance to think about how our lives have diverged, and to realize how quickly people often misjudge one another. My first reaction to your letter was sadness at how joyless and even insular your life now seems. Yet my life would also seem too-serious and over-specialized to a casual onlooker. I can't know what makes you tick from one letter, and I shouldn't try. Your personal life may be vibrant and thrilling and full of giving and getting. In fact, it's that part I'd really like to hear about sometime. In the meantime, I'll try to address some of the tacit intellectual positions which I think I may have glimpsed in your remarks so far.

Your apparent skepticism about the very possibility of a science of human nature (judging from your reluctance to comment on my introduction to Paul's book) is pretty understandable given the abject failure of modern psychology to offer real guidance to significant human enterprises. Paul once said that psychoanalysts live in an intuitive world where all insiders have the right to their own interpretations. Everything psychological does have some meaning, even the chatter of schizophrenics and the delirium of the physically ill, but a science of human nature cannot breathe in such an atmosphere. A science of the personality needs a context in which human goals are real. Significant data pertains to the ability of individuals to adhere to constructive human purposes. Without these goals life itself is deprived of meaning, and in this disoriented and disorganized maelstrom a great deal of psychic data can be found which goes nowhere. The practitioners of the magical arts build internally logical systems, buttressed by a high level of communication skills, and they are well protected from the challenge of reality as long as they stay within their insulated superstructure. The system only collapses when they are forced out of their safe position by the needs of others to apply their alleged insights to the real problems of human beings.

But you shouldn't let yourself believe that a science of human nature could never be developed merely because the documented attempts have been so wanting. A science of human nature could do as much to facilitate human happiness and fulfillment as did the science of epidemiology to stem the tragedy of childhood disease. The permanent benefits of such a system of ideas, available to all mankind, could far outweigh the efforts of generations of humanitarian lawyers and social workers addressing the most flagrant abuses of a corrupt and monolithic social system.

As I'm sure you're aware, everyone operates with a working model of human nature ticking inside their heads. Even if you choose not to comment on Paul's model, that doesn't mean that you could be neutral to its tenets. For me, your refusal to discuss human nature is like saying "People shouldn't talk about religion," and is tacitly cynical. But the real cost of ignoring efforts to make our understanding of human nature scientific, with being "diplomatically non-committal" in this greatest of human dialogs, is the resulting ignorance that is the true root of all evils. Are we to be content with opinions, hearsay, half-truths and folklore as the foundations upon which the very meaning of our lives rests? The development of a science of human nature is a project no one can be excused from taking part in, even those who think they're not ready to make the effort or have been exhausted by previous disappointments.

Of course you have every right not to partake professionally in the greatest intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, but I would be unhappy if I thought that a cynicism about human science had colored your personal life too. To be perfectly honest, when I read your articles I really began to wonder if you hadn't invested too much energy in scholarly self-sacrifice, in donations to noble causes, and too little in developing your own inner identity and psychological awareness. In spite of winning awards and making a name for yourself, you still seem oddly withdrawn. But your turning away from Marxist scholarship and towards the concrete realities of labor law shows a tremendous flexibility in your intention to find a meaningful contribution to make to the world, and gives me some hope that speaking frankly with you like this will not simply offend you but provide some useful intellectual stimulation. So in a spirit of friendship, in the hope of encouraging some "new thinking," and with the caveat that I may be very wrong in my assumptions about you and what your life has been like so far, I'm now going to risk offering my old teacher a few ideas.

I'm sure your long love affair with Karl Marx was a healthy expression of your deep capacity for idealization, and I'm sure your ideals are vividly alive today if in a different form. It must have been difficult for you to deal with the hateful cynicism of Stalinist and utopian Marxists whose rallying cry of "History will right these great wrongs" is only a new version of "God will punish our sins." Hatred of wrong does not in itself tell us what's right, and it certainly doesn't give us a crystal ball into the future. Building a world fit for people to live in takes lots of little tentative steps, a willingness to make mistakes, the honesty to admit when you've taken a wrong turn somewhere, and the courage to trust a helping hand. I believe it's up to each individual to work at putting things right, in his own life and through his own efforts. There's no power in history higher than the inner hopes and dreams of a Karl or a Dean.

And it doesn't matter if Marx or Jesus or Socrates or Buddha would approve of what makes us happy. We can go beyond them if we need to. If they're anything like what we imagine them to be, they would want us to, just as we want future generations to live better lives than we'll have had. I believe in lifting our heads up, listening to our hearts, and using our minds to achieve real happiness for ourselves and, if we can, for others. Of course, when we affirm our right to pursue happiness in our own way we'll want to give others that same right. This is why we can't live other people's lives for them, and why the grim labors of "intelligentsia" to manipulate history is naive. We can only set an example of how people can live, give others the right to be different, and teach those who come to us with questions.

One of the best features of the gay movement is the affirmation of love for its own sake. As Jesus and his like liberated love from family bonds, setting an example for all men, so gay men and women are liberating love from gender roles. It's an important step. Brotherly love teaches us that we belong in each other's lives, to take care of one another in sickness and in health. Schweitzer said, No man is ever completely and permanently a stranger to his fellow-man. Man belongs to man. Man has claims on man.

But this love, and the personal power it liberates, must be experienced to be understood. It can't be just a theoretical possibility left to some unborn generation to realize. We have to risk it here and now.

Until we get involved with people at a personal level — sharing their hopes and fears and dreams, sorting out the best in them from the worst in them, and developing a vocabulary with which to communicate effectively about psychological realities — no grand analysis of history or society can escape superficiality. Anyone can find statistical trends in recorded history and sociological data if they look for them; they exist in the distribution patterns of galactic clusters and tea leaves, too. But those things are dead exoskeletons, having no will of their own and bearing only the faintest impressions of the dynamic forces that set them in motion. Human will only exists in the individual, in the here and now of immediate experience.

True history is the story of man's heart, his aspirations for a better life, his ethical commitments towards his fellow man. Historians have always shied away from such subjective evaluations and concentrated on more easily measured and verified (but far less relevant) issues. To paraphrase Paul, I might say that the practitioners of history build internally logical systems, buttressed by a high level of communication skills; the system only collapses when they are forced out of their safe position by the needs of others to apply their alleged insights to the real problems of human beings.

All the history we have, much of it as thrilling as great literature, is more or less disinformation from this standpoint. And I don't have to tell you how happy some social theorists are to prattle more and more about less and less. Rather than searching for guidance in the slanted tracts of ancient scholars or modern fools, let's you and I make history today, by living lives fundamentally superior to those we lived yesterday, lives that honest men can admire and learn from. It's up to you and me to find true happiness for ourselves, set a visible example for others, and inch the planet toward true civilization.

Well, that's enough unsolicited advice for today. I hope I haven't made you too angry, and have stimulated you to want to write back. In the meantime, I am enclosing a new book for you []. It's my attempt to teach people about Paul at a human level, and includes an interview with your old friend Laurie. Many years ago you opened my mind to seeing how I could lay aside my childhood misery and come more fully to life. I hope this book can give you back something in kind. During my very first conversation with Paul, when I explained how much you had meant to me, he said, "I'd like to be a new Karl for you." I really want to see your life expand, as his did, to its fullest dimensions.