The Lost Massey Lectures (19 page)

The conditions of middle-class life are exquisitely calculated to increase tension and heighten anxiety. It is not so much that the pace is fast—often it consists of waiting around and is slow and boring—but that it is somebody else's pace or schedule. One is continually interrupted. And the tension cannot be normally discharged by decisive action and doing things one's own way. There is competitive pressure to act a role, yet paradoxically one is rarely allowed to do one's best or use one's best judgment. Proofs of success or failure are not tangibly given in the task, but always in some superior's judgment. Spontaneity and instinct are likely to be gravely penalized, yet one is supposed to be creative and sexual on demand. All this is what Freud called civilization and its discontents. Wilhelm Reich showed that this kind of anxiety led to dreams of destruction, self-destruction, and explosion, in order to release tension, feel something, and feel free.

A chronic low-grade emergency is not psychologically static. It builds up to and invites a critical emergency.

But just as we are able to overlook glaring economic and ecological realities, so in our social engineering and system of education glaring psychological realities like anomie and anxiety are regarded almost as if they did not exist.

The psychological climate explains, I think, the peculiar attitude of the Americans toward the escalation of the Vietnam War. (At the time I am writing this, more bombs are being rained on that little country than on Germany at the peak of World War II, and there is talk of sending half a million men.) The government's statements of purpose are inconsistent week by week and are belied by its actions. Its predictions are ludicrously falsified by what happens. Field commanders lie and are contradicted by the next day's news. Yet a good majority continues to acquiesce with a paralyzed fascination. This paralysis is not indifference, for finally people talk about nothing else—as I in these lectures. One has the impression that it is an exciting attraction of a policy that it is doomed.

I have been giving you a gloomy picture of my country. Our policies range from dishonest to delusional. Our system of interlocking institutions finally mechanically goes its own way and runs over human beings. Our people have become stupid and uncitizenly and are lusting for an explosion.

Nevertheless, let me praise us for a moment. We are headed for trouble but we have moral strengths. We have a healthy good humor, that is neither cynical nor resigned. We are seasoned—we got there first—in the high technology, high standard of living, and other conditions of modern times. I think we have fewer illusions about them than other advanced peoples; we are not so foolish and piggish about them as we seem. Morally, despite what seems, Americans are classless and democratic and cannot think in other terms; and if a case
really
comes to public notice, we will not
tolerate an individual's being pushed around—though it certainly takes a lot to get some cases to public notice. We are not cowed by authority. And we are energetic and experimental, though not very intelligent about it.

Perhaps our greatest strength is an historical one. Quixotic as it seems, we have an abiding loyalty to the spirit, and sometimes unfortunately the letter, of the American political system. Unlike in many other countries, our extreme groups—Birchites, students of the New Left, Negroes who want Black Power—are sincerely loyal to this history and spirit, more loyal indeed than the center is, which is lulled by its self-satisfied belief in social engineering. In a crisis, the great majority will continue to be historically loyal and we will not have fascism or 1984, though we may well have disaster. Thus, to repeat what I said at the beginning of this series of lectures, the question is whether our beautiful libertarian, pluralist, and populist experiment is indeed viable in modern conditions. We
can
make it so, both institutionally and because we have the will; the present trends are not inevitable. However, I am not sure that we will make it so, because of pressure of time and panicking.

A few weeks ago I had to give a talk at the dedication of the new law school at Rutgers University. What an exciting period it is for a law student, I said, if the study of law is regarded not as a technique for winning cases but as jurisprudence, the relation of law to justice and politics and the historical changes of law to meet new conditions. In the American tradition, the constitution-makers have been lawyers; and since we have so many new conditions, it is the task of young lawyers to come up with constitutional innovations to keep the American polity alive. Consider some of our
unique domestic problems, passing by the whole field of world law, that must be developed almost from scratch. When the media of mass communications require immense capital or, like the broadcasting channels, are scarce and licensed, how to safeguard against
de facto
censorship and the brainwashing that is now evident? When mass compulsory education stretches for longer years, how to give rights to the young so that they are not regimented like conscripts and processed as things? When nearly half the young adults are obliged to go to college, what are their social, political, and academic rights; what do
Lehrfreiheit
and
Lernfreiheit
now mean? In a hardening mandarin establishment of mutually accrediting universities, state boards, and corporate employers, how to change the licensing of professionals and indeed of ordinary employment, so that competent people are not stymied because they do not have irrelevant diplomas? When corporations have grown to the size of feudal baronies and the lines of communication within them become tenuous, the traditional concepts of responsibility of principal and agent are inadequate; how to protect subordinates as moral beings? what are their rights in the decisions they must execute? As technologies expand and their remote effects cannot be avoided by anybody, how to give citizens an effective voice in the shape of the environment, not to speak of a remedy against abuses? As the technical and staff power of the police and other bureaucracies increases, how to bolster the resources of citizens so that there is a fair contest in court and agency? As the complexity, delays, and distance of ordinary political processes become greater, while often the tension of problems becomes worse, it is inevitable that spirited people will resort to various degrees of protest and civil disobedience; how to encourage this rather than render it destructive by disregarding the need for it or even exacting draconian penalties to stamp it out? Finally, in a national corporate economy most taxes must be channeled
through the national government, yet municipal and community functions must still be locally controlled to be humanly relevant; then how to organize jurisdiction and budgeting so that people do not dodge their community responsibilities and yet central authorities do not take over?

Here, I said, are some of the crashingly important legal problems that must be solved in order to make American democracy work. And the behavior of the guild of lawyers is itself a case in point. If they simply accept the present formulations and try to win cases under them, they are avoiding their professional responsibility and giving authority by default to incompetent and unbridled powers, or to the drift of things. The same holds, of course, in other professions: in engineering, when the engineer merely executes a program handed down to him, rather than criticizing the program in terms of its community meaning and remote effects; in education, when a teacher serves as personnel in a school system, rather than contributing to the growing up of the young; in journalism, when a reporter follows an official line or caters to a mass market, rather than reporting the events and trying to tell their meaning. But there is no higher principle or authority (excepting the holy spirit and the nature of things) to which professional authority can be delegated, whether in Washington or the president of a university or the board of directors of a corporation or the electorate. It is only each profession, in touch with its own raw materials, daily practice, the judgment of peers, and its professional tradition that can initiate and decide on professional matters.

I chose this list, of course, to invent new rights, duties, and safe-guards in our increasingly monolithic system of institutions, to make an effective pluralism. They are nothing but an extension to
modern technological and social functions of the checks and balances discussions in the
Federalist Papers
that dealt mainly with territorial and commercial functions.

Now we have a school of sociology in the United States, that is the liberal orthodoxy, that holds that democratic rights are effectively secured by our present pluralism of institutions and interest groups, labor, capital, the professions, the universities, religious sects, ethnic groups, sectional interests, government, and the general public. According to this theory, these struggle for advantage and countervail one another, and through them each man can exert influence. Admittedly the institutions and interest groups are centralized and bureaucratized, but this is an advantage; for an individual can compete to rise in his own interest group, and the decision-makers of the various bureaucracies, each backed by massive power, can treat with one another in a rational way according to the rules of the game, for example by collective bargaining, and so avoid unseemly strikes, cut-throat competition, riot, and other disorder. This, in turn, makes possible a general harmony and diminishes everybody's anxiety. It is a sociologist's dream.

I am afraid that there is nothing in this theory. For the genius of our centralized bureaucracies has been, as they interlock, to form a mutually accrediting establishment of decision-makers, with common interests and a common style that nullify the diversity of pluralism. Conflict becomes coalition, harmony becomes consensus, and the social machine runs with no check at all. For instance, our regulatory agencies are wonderfully in agreement with the corporations they regulate. It is almost unheard of for the universities or scientists to say Veto, whether to the pesticides, or the causes of smog, the
TV
programming, the military strategy, or the moon-shot. (An exception was the fallout from the bomb-testing.) When labor leaders become labor statesmen, somehow
the labor movement dies. The farm bloc enters the harmony precisely by getting rid of farming and ceasing to have special interests. Press and broadcasting seem never to have to mount a determined campaign against either official handouts or their advertisers. And as for the classical countervalence of parliamentary democracy, the two-party system, after all the fury of campaigning, it almost never makes any difference which party has won. It seems to me impossible that there should be so much happiness.

But perhaps it is a pre-established harmony. I don't know if there is one power Elite, and I am sure that the conspiratorial System is a paranoia of the radical students; nevertheless, it is said that the President has a file of 25,000 names from which appointments are made, after a computer has brought forth the sub-group that fits the profile for the particular role. These are the good guys who count and who can be counted on to initiate and decide in style. Perhaps these sub-groups are what is left of the Plural Interests, and the file is what we mean by the Establishment. (I don't know if there is actually such a file, but there
is
a police-file of bad guys who use the wrong style.)

There is a metaphysical defect in our pluralism. The competing groups are all after the same values, the same money, the same standard of living and fringe benefits. There can then be fierce competition between groups for a bigger cut in the budget, but there is no moral or constitutional countervalence of interests. Let me put this another way: the bother with the profit system has turned out to be not, as the socialists predicted, that it doesn't work, but that it works splendidly; and so long as a person's activity pays off in the common coin, he doesn't much care about his special vocation, profession, functional independence, way of life, way of being in the community, or corporate responsibility for public good.

In the major decisions that are made by the interlocking decision-makers, the democratic representation of the ordinary person is “virtual” rather than actual, as with the American colonists in the British Parliament. If this is so, there is no pluralism. Interest groups become nothing but means of social engineering, to cushion protest and expedite communication from top down. (In my opinion, by the way, the transmission belt doesn't work. When a group does not have real power, the members simply stop attending meetings. In the New York City school system, it doesn't pay to be an active member of the Parents-Teachers Association.)

For a pluralism to work democratically—like a guild socialism, a syndicalist system, or a medieval commune—it must proceed in just the opposite direction than that envisaged by our orthodox sociologists. It must try to increase class consciousness, craft pride, professional autonomy, faculty power in the universities, cooperative enterprise, local patriotism, and rural reconstruction. When members of a group stubbornly stand for something, the association will throw its weight around in the community; when the association insists on its special role in the community that must be accommodated to in its own terms (though not, of course on its terms), the members will be active in the association. What would such a medieval pluralism entail?

In the first place, there would be conflict and not harmony. At present, labor and capital can come to an agreement on wages, hours, and benefits, and pass on the costs; but the situation is much more electric if workmen ask, as they should, for a say in the work-process and the quality and utility of the product on which they spend their lives. In an authentic pluralism, a teachers' union will want to determine curriculum, method, and class-size in the
public schools; but neither the administrators, the Mayor, nor the parents will agree to this. If the Medical Association comes on as a professional group, it will support rather than oppose community payment of fees, which is good for the health of the poor, but it will also intervene on slum conditions and the narcotic laws. The radio and television people will want some control over how they are edited and programmed. We are currently witnessing the conflicts that arise when ethnic groups are organized in their neighborhoods in an authentically pluralistic fashion.