Technopoly (20 page)

Now, in the first place, this conclusion is merely a commonplace of human experience, known by just about everyone from Maimonides to your aunt and uncle. The exceptions seem to be American psychiatrists. Before he conducted his experiment, Milgram sent a questionnaire to a large group of psychiatrists from whom he solicited opinions as to how many subjects
would be likely to continue giving electric shocks when ordered to do so. The psychiatrists thought the number would be very much smaller than it actually was, basing their estimates on their knowledge of human behavior (which only recently has admitted the idea that people fear death). I do not mean to imply that real scientists never produce commonplaces, but only that it is rare, and never a cause for excitement. On the other hand, commonplace conclusions are almost always a characteristic of social research pretending to be science.

In the second place, Milgram’s study was not empirical in the strict sense, since it was not based on observations of people in natural life situations. I assume that no one is especially interested in how people behave in a laboratory at Yale or any other place; what matters is how people behave in situations where their behavior makes a difference to their lives. But any conclusions that can be drawn from Milgram’s study must specify that they apply only to people in laboratories under the conditions Milgram arranged. And even if we assume a correspondence between laboratory behavior and more lifelike situations, no predictions can be made about
what
lifelike situations these might be. Nor can any serious claim be made that there is a causal relationship between the acceptance of legitimate authority and doing what you are told. In fact, Milgram himself shows us that there is not, since 35 percent of his subjects told the “authority figure” to bug off. Moreover, Milgram had no idea
why
some people did and some people did not tell him to bug off. For myself, I feel quite sure that if each of Milgram’s subjects had been required to read Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem
before showing up at the laboratory, his numbers would have been quite different.

But let us suppose that I am wrong about that, and let us further suppose that Milgram had found that 100 percent of his subjects did what they were told, with or without Hannah Arendt. And now let us suppose that I tell you a story of a
group of people who in some real situation refused to comply with the orders of a legitimate authority—let us say, the Danes who in the face of Nazi occupation helped nine thousand Jews escape to Sweden. Would you say to me that this cannot be so because Milgram’s study proves otherwise? Or would you say that this overturns Milgram’s work? Perhaps you would say that the Danish response is not relevant, since the Danes did not regard the Nazi occupation as constituting legitimate authority. But then, how would we explain the cooperative response to Nazi authority of the French, the Poles, and the Lithuanians? I think you would say none of these things, because Milgram’s experiment does not confirm or falsify any theory that might be said to postulate a law of human nature. His study—which, incidentally, I find both fascinating and terrifying—is not science. It is something else entirely.

Which leads me to say what sort of work I think Milgram was engaged in—and what sort of work those who study human behavior and situations are engaged in. I will start by making reference to a famous correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Freud once sent a copy of one of his books to Einstein, asking for his evaluation of it. Einstein replied that he thought the book exemplary but was not qualified to judge its scientific merit. To which Freud replied somewhat testily that, if Einstein could say nothing of its scientific merit, he, Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work
is
exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing—and Stanley Milgram was doing—is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture. Their
work is a form of storytelling. Science itself is, of course, a form of storytelling too, but its assumptions and procedures are so different from those of social research that it is extremely misleading to give the same name to each. In fact, the stories of social researchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes. And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose. The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer.

A novelist—for example, D. H. Lawrence—tells a story about the sexual life of a woman—Lady Chatterley—and from it we may learn things about the secrets of some people, and wonder if Lady Chatterley’s secrets are not more common than we had thought. Lawrence did not claim to be a scientist, but he looked carefully and deeply at the people he knew and concluded that there is more hypocrisy in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. Alfred Kinsey was also interested in the sexual lives of women, and so he and his assistants interviewed thousands of them in an effort to find out what they believed their sexual conduct was like. Each woman told her story, although it was a story carefully structured by Kinsey’s questions. Some of them told everything they were permitted to tell, some only a little, and some probably lied. But
when all their tales were put together, a collective story emerged about a certain time and place. It was a story more abstract than D. H. Lawrence’s, largely told in the language of statistics and, of course, without much psychological insight. But it was a story nonetheless. One might call it a tribal tale of one thousand and one nights, told by a thousand and one women, and its theme was not much different from Lawrence’s—-namely, that the sexual life of some women is a lot stranger and more active than some other stories, particularly Freud’s, had led us to believe.

I do not say that there is no difference between Lawrence and Kinsey. Lawrence unfolds his story in a language structure called a narrative. Kinsey’s language structure is called exposition. These forms are certainly different, although not so much as we might suppose. It has been remarked about the brothers Henry and William James that Henry was the novelist who wrote like a psychologist, and William the psychologist who wrote like a novelist. Certainly, in my meaning of the word “story,” exposition is as capable of unfolding one as is narrative. Of course, Lawrence’s story is controlled entirely by the limits of his own imagination, and he is not obliged to consult any social facts other than those he believed he knew. His story is pure personal perception, and that is why we call it fiction. Kinsey’s story comes from the mouths of others, and he is limited by what they answered when he asked his questions. Kinsey’s story, therefore, we may call a documentary. But, like all stories, it is infused with moral prejudice and sociological theory. It is Kinsey who made up the questions, and chose who would be interviewed, the circumstances of the interview, and how the answers would be interpreted. All of this gives shape and point to his story. Indeed, we may assume that Kinsey, like Lawrence, knew from the outset what the theme of his story would be. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have cared to tell it.

Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanité driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.

I think it justifiable to say that, in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture. In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.

I do not mean, incidentally, that the metaphors of social research are created in the same way as those of novels and plays. The writer of fiction creates metaphors by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus. The researcher tends to do it the other way around. The focus is on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion. Also, the novelist proceeds by showing. The researcher, using abstract social facts,
proceeds by reason, by logic, by argument. That is why fiction is apt to be more entertaining. Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh
shows
us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorstein Veblen
argues
them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulberg
shows
us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has tried to
explain
through sociological analysis. So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. But the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our own times, apparently more credible.

Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his). It is true, of course, that social researchers rarely base their claims to knowledge on the indisputability of sacred texts, and even less so on revelation. But we must not be dazzled or deluded by differences in method between preachers and scholars. Without meaning to be blasphemous, I would say that Jesus was as keen a sociologist as Veblen. Indeed, Jesus’ remark about rich men, camels, and the eye of a needle is as good a summary of Veblen’s
Theory of the Leisure Class
as it is possible to make. As social researchers, Jesus and Veblen differed in that Veblen was more garrulous.
⁴

Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again. If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modern style. And these stories will be told anew decades and centuries from now, with, I imagine, less effect. For it would seem that Technopoly does not want
these kinds of stories but facts—hard facts, scientific facts. We might even say that in Technopoly precise knowledge is preferred to truthful knowledge but that in any case Technopoly wishes to solve, once and for all, the dilemma of subjectivity. In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique. They mock statistics and polls and standardized tests and bureaucracies. In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In Technopoly, it is an insult to call someone a “moralizer.” Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into “sciences,” in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.

That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as “discoveries” of scientific enterprise. In this way, social researchers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts. In Technopoly, it is not enough to argue that the segregation of blacks and whites in schools is immoral, and it is useless to offer
Black Boy
or
Invisible Man
or
The Fire Next Time
as proof. The courts must be shown that standardized academic and psychological tests reveal that blacks do less well than whites and feel demeaned when segregation exists. In Technopoly, it is not
enough to say it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to read
Les Misérables
or
Nana
or, indeed, the New Testament. You must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are “worth reading”; they are artifacts of our past. But as for “truth,” we must turn to “science.” Which brings me to the crux of what I mean by Scientism, and why it has emerged in Technopoly.