Parenting & Family Quote by Polykarp Kusch

A scientist addressing the humanities is already a small provocation: Polykarp Kusch, a physicist formed by the mid-century boom in American research, frames “history, economics, sociology, literature and language” as not ornamental disciplines but operating instructions for modern power. The sentence is built like a handoff. He doesn’t praise their curiosity; he assigns them a job. “I present the challenge” lands with the blunt confidence of someone used to problems that yield to method and funding.

The key phrase is “enormous resources in our grasp.” In Kusch’s era, that likely means the postwar state, industrial scale, mass education, and the research apparatus that could split atoms and map economies. It carries the aftertaste of the Manhattan Project worldview: we can do almost anything; the real question is what we choose to do with it. The subtext is a quiet reprimand to a society that confuses capability with progress. Abundance has arrived, yet “a genuinely good life” remains a “problem,” not an automatic outcome.

“Genuinely” is doing the moral work. It suggests he’s wary of defining the good life as consumption, status, or technological novelty. And by narrowing the beneficiaries to “yourselves and your children,” he makes the stakes intimate, not utopian. This isn’t about abstract “humanity”; it’s about the generational contract, the everyday texture of living that policy, culture, and narrative shape.

Kusch’s intent feels like intellectual triage: science can expand the toolbox, but the humanities must decide what the tools are for, and how to keep “resources” from becoming merely more efficient ways to produce dissatisfaction.