The Lost Massey Lectures (10 page)

Abroad, the Americans still engage in plenty of old-fashioned exploitation of human labor, as in Latin America; yet the tendency is again to regard the underdeveloped peoples as not quite persons, and to try to shape them up by (sometimes) generous assistance in our own style. For example, one of the radical ideas of General Learning, the subsidiary of General Electric and Time, Inc., is to concentrate on electronic devices to teach literacy to the masses of children in poor countries; we must export our Great Society. Our enterprisers are eager to build highways and pipelines through the jungle, to multiply bases for our aeroplanes, and to provide other items of the American standard of living, for which the western-trained native political leaders have “rising aspirations.” Unfortunately, this largesse must often result in disrupting age-old cultures, fomenting tribal wars, inflating prices and wages and reducing decent poverty to starvation, causing the abandonment of farms and disastrous instant urbanization, making dictatorships inevitable, and drawing simple peoples into Great Power conflicts. And woe if they do not then shape up, if they want to
develop according to their local prejudices, for instance for land reform. They become an uncontrollable nuisance, surely therefore allied with our enemies, and better dead than Red. In his great speech in Montreal, Secretary McNamara informed us that since 1958, 87% of the very poor nations and 69% of the poor nations, but only 48% of the middle income nations, have had serious violent disturbances. The cure for it, he said, was development, according to the criteria of our cash economy, while protected from subversion by our bombers. How to explain to this arithmetically astute man that he is not taking these people seriously as existing?

A startlingly literal corollary of the principle that our system excludes human beings rather than exploits them is the agreement of all liberals and conservatives that there must be a check on population growth, more especially among backward peoples and the poor at home. We are definitely beyond the need for the labor of the “proletariat” (“producers of offspring”) and the Iron Law of Wages to keep that labor cheap. Yet I am bemused by this unanimous recourse to a biological and mathematical etiology for our troubles. Probably there
is
a danger of world-overpopulation in the foreseeable future. (The United States, though, is supposed to level off at 300 millions in 2020, and this would not be a dense population for our area.) Certainly with the likelihood of nuclear war there is a danger of world-underpopulation. However, until we institute more human ecological, economic, and political arrangements, I doubt that population control is the first order of business; nor would I trust the Americans to set the rules.

In this lecture, I have singled out two trends of the dominant organization of American society, its increasing tendency to expand, meaninglessly, for its own sake, and its tendency to exclude human beings as useless. It is the Empty Society, the obverse face of the Affluent Society. When Adam Smith spoke of the Wealth of Nations, he did not mean anything like this.

The meaningless expansion and the excluding are different things, but in our society they are essentially related. Lack of meaning begins to occur when the immensely productive economy over-matures and lives by creating demand instead of meeting it; when the check of the free market gives way to monopolies, subsidies, and captive consumers; when the sense of community vanishes and public goods are neglected and resources despoiled; when there is made-work (or war) to reduce unemployment; and when the measure of economic health is not increasing well-being but abstractions like the Gross National Product and the rate of growth.

Human beings tend to be excluded when a logistic style becomes universally pervasive, so that values and data that cannot be standardized and programmed are disregarded; when function is adjusted to the technology rather than technology to function; when technology is confused with autonomous science, a good in itself, rather than being limited by political and moral prudence; when there develops an establishment of managers and experts who alone license and allot resources, and it deludes itself that it knows the only right method and is omnicompetent. Then common folk become docile clients, maintained by sufferance, or they are treated as deviant.

It is evident that, for us, these properties of the empty society are essentially related. If we did not exclude so many as not really
persons, we would have to spend more of our substance on worthwhile goods, including subsistence goods, both at home and abroad; we would have to provide a more human environment for the children to grow up in; there would be more paths to grow up and more ways of being a person. On the other hand, if we seriously and efficiently tackled the problems of anomie, alienation, riot, pollution, congestion, urban blight, degenerative and mental disease, etc., we would find ourselves paying more particular attention to persons and neighborhoods, rather than treating them as standard items; we would have a quite different engineering and social science; and we would need all the human resources available.

Certainly we would stop talking presumptuously about The Great Society and find ourselves struggling, in the confusing conditions of modern times, for a decent society.

The chief danger to American society at present, and to the world from American society, is our mindlessness, induced by empty institutions. It is a kind of mesmerism, a self-delusion of formal rightness, that affects both leaders and people. We have all the talking-points but less and less content. The Americans are decent folk, generous and fairly compassionate. They are not demented and fanatical, like some other imperial powers of the past and present, but on the contrary rather skeptical and with a sense of humor. They are not properly called arrogant, though perhaps presumptuous. But we have lost our horse sense, for which we were once noted. This kind of intelligence was grounded not in history or learning, nor in finesse of sensibility and analysis, but in the habit of making independent judgments and in democratically rubbing shoulders with all kinds and conditions. We have lost it by becoming personnel of a mechanical system and exclusive suburbanites, by getting out of contact with real jobs and real people. We suddenly have developed an
Establishment, but our leaders do not have the tradition and self-restraint to come on like an establishment. Thus, we are likely to wreak havoc not because of greed, ideology, or arrogance, but because of a bright strategy of the theory of games and an impatient conviction that other people don't know what's good for them.

In the first lecture, I depicted my country as bound on a course that must lead either to an empty and immoral empire or to exhaustion and fascism. There is evidence for both gloomy pictures. Let me now mention some counter-forces and give evidence for a future of more decency. These forces seem weaker and, except for court decisions, they do not constitute official policy nor control technology. Yet they are wonderfully stubborn and show flashes of power. And of course the traditional American sentiment is that a decent society cannot be built by dominant official policy but only by grass-roots resistance, community development, social invention, and citizenly vigilance to protect liberty. These, surprisingly, are reviving. In any case, if, even with good intentions, the interlocking corporate style destroys vitality, an increasing ragged conflict (hopefully without much violence) might at present be our best hope.

The ambiguity of values in America is really striking. Often it is as if there were a line down the front page of
The New York Times
, with half of the stories making one despondent, afraid, or indignant and half cheerful, hopeful, and proud. Needless to say, the trends that please me are called un-American by some; but you will recognize them as classically American.
The question is whether or not our beautiful libertarian, pluralist, and populist experiment is viable in modern conditions.
If it's not, I don't know any other acceptable politics, and I'm a man without a country.

With a few exceptions, the Supreme Court has been extending liberty of publication, art, assembly, and political action. It has condoned flagrant examples of civil disobedience. Even more significant are its decisions limiting the police, forbidding wiretapping and forced confession, and tightening due process, for here the conflict with the system is evident. The trend of the government, the suburbs, etc., is toward more police, equipped with a powerful technology, and instant national and international connections; but the Court and a stubborn group of lawyers and sociologists seem determined to resist unchecked police power and draconian punishments. Capital punishment is being rather rapidly abolished, largely, I think, because of the general revulsion, well expressed by Camus, against the mechanical State snuffing out a life. New York and the District of Columbia have reformed the bail system, to rescue the poor from rotting in jail before trial, and other states will follow suit. These reforms are the reverse of the moral insensitivity I spoke of in my first lecture. It is not 1984. We are as yet unwilling to identify with the system in which we nevertheless act.

Some cities have adopted civilian boards to review complaints against the police. (But New York has just voted its board out of existence: these cases are touch and go.) Legislation is proposed for a Public Defender to offset the advantage of the State Attorney's
staff and business machines. There is talk of an ombudsman to review complaints against government bureaucracy. Almost invariably, to be sure, such agencies, like the regulatory agencies in Washington, end up in coalition with what they are supposed to regulate; they cushion protest rather than remedy abuses; nevertheless, they do indicate an awakening alarm about total control. Unwilling to alter the framework, people hanker for a kind of Roman tribune to intervene with his drastic personal vote. A better proposal, in my opinion, is for disadvantaged groups, like Negroes, to police their own neighborhoods according to their own mores.

Puritanism persists, yet there is a remarkable shift away from moralism and hypocrisy, and toward plain inconsistency. For instance, narcotics laws are strengthened and extended to
LSD
and other non-addictives; but there is a strong campaign for the English system for the addictive drugs, and champions of
LSD
have a messianic fervor, claiming that the issue is between conformism and a personal or religious way of life. We have the odd situation that penalties become heavier while public opinion is more and more uncertain.

The continuing sexual revolution deserves special notice. Here the inconsistency between High Thought and the repressive laws and sexless schools is blatant. But the most practical change has been not the actual sexual behavior of the adolescents and adults, which so far has not produced much poetry or deep joy, though it is better than the sexual climate in which I grew up; rather, it is the now widely accepted freedom of the children, the relaxed toilet-training, permitted masturbation, nakedness, informal dress. A generation ago we were warned that this freedom would produce an unruly brood; it has, and I like the results. Correspondingly, counter to the gigantism and stepped up schedule, curriculum, and grading of the official schools, there is a revival of
progressive schools, and inevitably these veer toward A. S. Neill's Summerhill, freeing the children from compulsory attendance and giving them a say in the school administration. Progressive education belongs, of course, to only a few middle class families; yet the Freedom Schools of the Negro revolution are pedagogically not so very different.

There is a revival in the churches. Long pillars of the establishment, they too have begun to take alarm that the establishment is becoming anti-human; and we find clergymen in the unlikely position of fighting for migrant farm-workers and against the drug and sex laws, and confessing that God is
not
on our side in Vietnam and in manufacturing nuclear bombs. The churches have latched onto non-directive community-development. Some of them have sponsored the most daring, and unofficious, protest organizations and legal defense for Negroes and Spanish-Americans. In New York City, the best community theaters—indeed the best theaters—are in churches; nor are the plays lacking in dirty words. And on many college campuses, the young existentialist chaplain—or even the Catholic—is the center of radical student activity.

There is an odd explosion in the arts, with an immense number of amateurs, of a kind of urban folk art in all genres. It is entirely inauthentic in style, combining misunderstood fragments of international culture with commercialized mountain music and stereotyped urban naturalism; yet it is authentic to the actual urban confusion. On a more intellectual level, there have been lovely sporadic attempts to enliven the cities with happenings in the park, spontaneous fence painting, and vest-pocket playgrounds laid out by adolescents. Unfortunately, since the urban folk have neither tradition nor resources and their art is largely an outcry of alienation, there is no popular effort to cope with the big horrors of urban ugliness and pollution; even so, what the folk do has
more vitality than the synthetic culture-centers sponsored by government and foundations.

Economically, there is an increase in minimum wages and unionization of the most exploited groups, hospital attendants and migrant farmhands. More significantly, there is a growing sentiment, which I think will prevail, for a guaranteed minimum income, which would be far preferable, in the United States, to the present system of welfare payments and social services. It would be a giant step toward making decent poverty possible, reopening independent choice of how to live, and encouraging small businesses and rural reconstruction. It would loosen top-down control.