The age in perspective
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur. --Alfred North Whitehead
If it sometimes seems as if American society is close to being wrecked, and if it is unclear whether the cause is an advance or a retreat in civilization, one must step back for a better view. Dissent and protest, black bitterness and white resentment, ghetto and suburb, student riot and police reprisal must be seen from a certain distance if they are not to become hopelessly blurred. America's conflicts are the products of old attitudes in U.S. history as well as new forces in 20th century society. To understand them at all, Americans must look backward as well as forward; the era must be regarded in perspective.
What makes it difficult to get a true fix on the nation's position is the permanent characteristic of the age--the bewildering speed of change. The fact is often stated. But just recognizing it is little help in trying to grasp the impact. In the past three generations, the everyday life of Western man has changed more than it did in the previous 2,000 years. A revolution in farm technology has shifted huge populations into teeming cities. Already 73% of Americans live on only 1% of the land; by 1985, U.S. cities will swell by the equivalent of five New Yorks. Mobility has scattered families and eroded the continuities that once cemented local loyalties. Great organizations are now society's principal units. Knowledge is the key economic resource. Innovation seems to be salvation. So swift is the pace of modern change that, in terms of common experience, America has a new generation every five years.
Creeping pessimism
Man is still largely geared to the old rhythms: learning slowly the faces of his children, observing the seasons, the habits and kindnesses of one wife at a time. But now, unable to go to school in nature, he must rapidly learn and unlearn technical ways that his father did not know and that may prove useless to his children. Religion fell away, while faith in industrial progress became a form of religion--now itself eroded by creeping pessimism. Less than ever before is Western man sure of his own nature, except that he is so adaptable. That quality is all that saves him from the pathological anxiety experienced by tribal Africans exposed too abruptly to technology. It is also what inures him to urban filth and noise and crowding--and doing too little about them.
This is the age of overlapping ages--the atomic age, the jet age, the space age, the age of cybernetics and now of protest. Time has been telescoped as never before. Rome enjoyed three centuries of imperial power. Britain dominated much of the world for 100 years. The U.S. has only recently emerged fully onto the world scene, its influence vast and apparently to continue; yet Americans have already begun to question the durability of their power. After the anguished strain of World War II, the country quickly learned to live with a cold war, making rather enlightened attempts to maintain peace and justice in the postwar world. To achieve world stability, the U.S. concentrated on foreign policy--a sign of growing maturity in a once isolationist nation --and let economic and educational growth at home more or less take care of themselves. They did, but not always for the best.
Perhaps for the first time, America as a nation has now been forced to contemplate the ambiguities of all human action. The U.S. has had a glimpse of those twin catastrophes, unmerited failures and the irony of fulfilled desires. To know the age, the seven deadly sins are no longer an adequate guide. Modern men must become accustomed to the seven disconcerting paradoxes:
THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM. Having pursued freedom more successfully than any other nation, the country finds that it can lead both to civic irresponsibility and to an unparalleled sense of lost personal freedom. The question looms ever larger: "Freedom for what?"
THE PARADOX OF POWER. Great national power always brings an awareness of its limits. This is true for the U.S. both in the relative failure of the Viet Nam war and in the frustrations at home. It has often been said that only what a society truly values will be well done. Yet Americans are just glimpsing the sobering possibility that ideals and reforms it does value may not be well achieved, or achieved at all.
THE PARADOX OF WEALTH. The long American dream of "middleclass comfort for everybody" is nearing fulfillment at home. But an exploding population makes even a small percentage of poor an enormous number of people (one out of nine in the U.S.) As a result, poverty is now the most dramatic material problem of the day--though the situation is clearly improving. Even if it is solved at home, poverty threatens the peace abroad, where the gap between rich and poor nations is steadily widening. Instead of a highway to Utopia, the road to wealth now looks more like a gilded treadmill.
THE PARADOX OF SPEED. Apollo 8 whizzed to the moon at a speed that would have taken it around the earth in less than an hour. Anyone with a credit card can jet from New York to London between lunch and breakfast. Yet air congestion is likely to make him late, just as millions of commuters are habitually unable to get to work on time in big cities. When Jean-Luc Godard's recent film, Weekend, opens with the whole of France bogged down in a universal traffic jam, the not-so-fantastic scene raises a symbolic question, "Where were all those people going?" and seems to provide a gloomy answer: To the end of the world.
THE PARADOX OF KNOWLEDGE. Ninety percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are still alive, and much of what they know has been modified in their lifetimes. Technology soon promises to make material from computer libraries and microfilm reference works instantly available electronically in every home and school. In two seconds, machines now do mathematical problems that would take a man 38 years to solve. Xerox machines multiply paper and print at a volume that rivals the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Yet fewer and fewer individuals feel capable of understanding the world they live in. More and more decisions are made by specialists pooling their small fragments of individual expertise.
THE PARADOX OF COMMUNICATIONS. In post-McLuhan America, universities give a Ph.D. degree in communications. Telstars convey TV programs instantly to all parts of the world. Yet TV may spread epidemics of violence, and commercials breed frustration. Never before have so many people agonized so much about "the failure to communicate." Meanwhile, no one has ever adequately answered Thoreau's laconic comment, made in 1845 when he contemplated the invention of the telegraph: "Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
THE PARADOX OF INTERDEPENDENCE. Man is fast approaching a condition long urged by religious teachers as a spiritual ideal--the condition of human interdependence. John Donne preached to 17th century Londoners the message that "no man is an island." Modern technology is making it almost impossible to be one. New Yorkers particularly recall how the failure of a single distant power relay darkened the world's largest metropolitan area for hours. Every year, more men and institutions are irrevocably delivered into one another's hands as the world becomes bound by infinite threads of communications, trade and power. The balance of terror, which now ensures a measure of peace in the nuclear world, is interdependence at its fearful summit. To treat one's neighbor as oneself today is not merely virtuous but a matter of sheer necessity. While this condition offers great opportunity and hope of progress, it also threatens disruption by the few, who can work irretrievable havoc on the many.
The net effect of these paradoxes has been to undermine Western man's traditional confident faith in the future. And yet the latest visions of the future are more dizzying than ever. One of the most fascinating and perhaps saving characteristics of the age may well be man's unfolding ability to project possible "alternative futures" by means of computers --and then try to make the best future come about. Despite their fears, Americans are being encouraged with more detailed images than ever before of things to come.
Technetronic tomorrows
Arnold Toynbee saw historic evolution as a flowering and decaying of civilizations, partly based on their response to the challenge of providing individuals with a religious vision larger than themselves. In some ways, this view is not far from those held by many of today's dissatisfied youths, who yearn to identify with universal perceptions, to be stirred by some cosmic vibration. Moreover, it is just possible that today's technocratic futurists will help find it, simply by applying systems-analysis to the variables of what they call the "technetronic" age.
The futurists already sound like managerial mystics or necromancers with divine research contracts. As they see it, man is about to enter a period of industrial fruitfulness so astounding that most of the world will be totally liberated from scarcity. A radical leap in the quantity and efficiency of everything will iron out most of our present confusion. The spur will be the gross national products of the U.S. and the world, which are exploding even faster than population. The overall result will be that by the year 2000, the average U.S. family income will reach $20,980 (1965-dollar buying power). Within the following 100 years, even in relatively backward countries like the U.A.R. and India, the figure will edge past $3,500, the 1965 U.S. per capita share of the gross national product. Unlike some doom-ridden thinkers, the futurists do not seem unduly worried about predictions that the world population will double (to at least 6 billion) in the next 30 years and turn humanity into a colossal anthill. The researchers at the Hudson Institute look forward to at least three megalopolises in the U.S. alone--"Boswash," stretching from New England to the nation's capital, "Chipitts," burgeoning southeast from the Great Lakes to Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, and a third along the West Coast. Even at maximum population-growth rates, some experts say, the density in these areas would be no greater in A.D. 2000 than it is today in western Holland.
Human hibernation
The planners' confidence in their predictions is based partly on the experience of the very institutions that have set the astonishing postwar growth in motion--today's mammoth industrial corporations, many of which now can and do project their markets 20 years ahead simply in order to keep their enormous output at full blast. According to Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the efficiency of these corporate cornucopias reflects the fact that decisive power within them is exercised not so much by headstrong top leaders as by an unemotional "technostructure" composed of specialized middle-level experts. The big corporation's planning has such impact on the whole economy that, according to the futurists, governments themselves will soon apply more and more sophisticated industrial-planning techniques to public programs, making it possible to weigh and choose between national policies, just as corporations choose between different products.
If the new technocracy can be as innovative as it is calculating, human life may soon change even more radically than at present. Already the time that used to be required between scientific discovery and its massive industrial application has decreased dramatically. Barely three years (1948-51) separated the invention of transistors from their wholesale manufacture. The first manned spacecraft rocketed skyward in 1961; by mid-1969 we may be on the moon. Even three years ago, freezing as a substitute for burial was a macabre fantasy. Today ten known cases exist, along with predictions of deep-freeze hibernation for the living. Three years ago, heart transplants were expected "some time" soon. Today more than 100 have been performed, and wholesale interchange of organs seems possible.
Undersea cities, fish farming, household robots, the learning of languages in sleep, choosing the sex of children in advance--such things have become nearly as predictable as simple everyday improvements like rubber-bottomed garbage cans. Science-fiction writers are becoming the prophets of the day after tomorrow.
"With luck and hard work," says Arthur Clarke, the dean of science-fiction writers, "we have a chance to see the final end of the Dark Ages." It seems an irresistible vision, a Faustian grand finale for rational humanist men.
Yet more and more thoughtful people are objecting to the triumphal last act, the closer it seems to be. The reason for this lack of excitement at the by-now ritually invoked vision of material Utopia is that it has been held out too often. Today, at least in wintry moments of perception, it comes on as overblown and unconvincing as a TV commercial.
For more than a hundred years now, what might be called industrial humanism, the dream of total progress through production and distribution, has held general credence in Western civilization. Science, industry, and a morality of shared materialism were linked in a powerful secular religion of consensus.
Only lately has that consensus shown real signs of disintegrating. Modern society has established all sorts of machinery for regulating and improving man. But the regulatory machinery keeps breaking down, as it did in the two great World Wars. The 20th century, marked by an almost numbing thrust of knowledge and human ingenuity, is now infected with correspondingly profound pessimism.
Romanticism revisited
Much of it is due to shortsighted overselling of the possibilities of evolutionary progress. Darwin's theories showed that man had evolved from primordial protoplasm. But that evolution from a lower to a higher form of life had taken some two billion years. (Biologist H. J. Muller has graphically illustrated how long it took by imagining the span of time since life first appeared on earth as a trip along a tape running 90 miles from beyond New Haven to the center of a desk on Wall Street. Man appears 7 1/2 feet from the center.) Darwin's theory did not suggest that man as a biological animal had improved in the 5,000 years of more or less civilized history. There was no real proof either that evolution toward a still higher life form could be speeded up by improving man's environment.
Pessimistic objections to the present course and rate of improvement--indeed to the whole idea of material progress as an absolute value--have been stirred, too, by a continued, if unequal, philosophic conflict over the nature of man. In one view--long predominant and customarily summed up by Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am"--thought and instinct are separate and man at his best is a rational animal. In the other view, often pilloried under the pejorative name Romanticism, thought and feeling are rightly and forever intermingled. Systems are to be avoided, individuality is stressed--which often made Romantics rebels against society. Man is naturally in tune with the divine in nature until he lets himself be corrupted away from his original innocence and natural virtue by organized society. On the whole, Romantic feeling has been a social outcast, preserved by poets and writers, celebrated unwittingly by ordinary men. The rational approach assumes that anything, including God, that cannot be proved to exist, does not exist. One essentially Romantic reply in religion was Kierkegaard's assertion that man must leap into faith, as into darkness, with no reassuring proof that God exists. Another response was modern Existentialism. In what it gloomily concedes is now a mechanistic world, it seeks to restore man's sense of individual vitality and will by urging him to will his own predetermined fate, just as a swimmer, stroking hard enough with an overwhelming current, can create the illusion that he is self-propelled.
The Romantic resistance to rational materialism has shown itself in many other ways, among them the current hippie revolt, the angry posturing of youth all over the world, and the misgivings of more and more men about the projected computerized world of the future. All these are essentially a reassertion of the Romantic values.
Crossroads of creativity
Like today's futurists, many middle-class white students, though genuinely indignant about economic and racial inequalities, have begun judging the country as if its material problems had virtually been solved. Progress, they argue from this philosophical perspective, has in many ways made men worse, not better. No matter how dazzling, GNP can never spell GOD. Rockets, computers, the fair distribution of enough goods and services have little value except as machinery used to create a society. That society is valuable only in terms of the caliber of its people, their sense of justice and honesty, their appreciation of beauty, their self-restraint, the excellence of their thought and discourse. Freedom itself is ultimately valuable only if the individuals exercising it are actually choosing something valuable, are actually imbued with a sense of virtue and purpose.
These assertions greatly resemble similar assertions in the past, which have been brushed aside by earlier Establishments. The world's youthful dissidents, moreover, often sound irresponsible and unscrupulous, their thoughts confused and cluttered with echoes of anarchy and hand-me-down Marxism. In their desire to shake and shock the society they criticize, they often trample on democratic procedure, and most are remarkably lacking in a sense of history. Yet their criticism is not negligible. For it calls attention to the quality of the life man has created precisely at the moment when modern society seems to stand at a crossroads of creativity--the moral choice implicit in the new capacity of geneticists to change and control the very being of unborn man. To bring about this evolutionary leap forward will require decisions on how man should be changed (less aggressive, surely, but what else?) and agreement on the highest possible goals for future humanity.
Some of the young dissidents are private, hedonistic and escapist, but many of them are turning to politics, hoping to encourage some new political alignments into being. America, they see, will dramatically improve only if it is actively organized around needs and values--which now should far exceed life, liberty and property. Only then will the country really be doing what it set out to do.
The greatest potential for growth and planning, as well as for controlling the quality of what citizens desire, today lies with the great corporations. They pay enormous taxes, often spend millions on foundations and civic good works. But they do not yet seem prepared for the idea that the business of business could be this: to sell goods and services whose influence on American taste and values might--instead of being mediocre and sometimes baneful--be actively inspiriting and benign. The students certainly do not see business helping, except as a result of Government pressure.
Natural piety
But the young may yet succeed in overhauling the practices of industrial society through an informal alliance with nonpolitical forces: science and religion. Technical knowledge becomes more important every day, and with it the potential influence of universities, especially science faculties. Today, too, the social values implicit in much scientific thought reinforce rather than undercut those of religion. Scientists are increasingly shocked by dangerous pollution and man-made imbalances which industries and individuals refuse to take seriously. Whether studying cells or primitive societies they are concerning themselves more and more with the delicate interrelationships and harmonies of nature, seeking plans and patterns that can be applied to improving the harmony of modern society. In doing so, they are returning to a kind of natural piety, a reverence for the complexities of creation, which were the original province of religion. These are matters on which many churchmen, scientists and the "flower power" folk can now agree. What might come of all this, no one can yet say. A seer of science fiction, at any rate, has already dealt with the possibility of a militant underground, composed of Christians and conservationists, who join forces to take over industrial America and save it from itself.
Behind the hopes and criticisms of the angry young are unspoken questions that reach far beyond the youth revolt itself. In the long scale of history, where do the U.S. and Western society stand? Do civilizations really flower and decay according to clear-cut laws? If so, are America's troubles, as Whitehead suggests, painful signs of new fruitfulness to come? Or is the U.S., as others insist, a doomed society, grown divided and decadent even before it could come to maturity? Not only hope but hard evidence points to the Whitehead hypothesis. One thing ought to be clear from experience. Whether God is dead or not, belief in God or something very like him seems to be an ecological necessity for the balance of man in society. The same is true of faith in the possibility of progress and a sense of mission in the world, though in the future these concepts will perhaps not be used in the same simplistic, old-fashioned ways.
It is, ironically, the blacks who, in their very bitterness, testify to this. The young white protesters, criticizing materialism, are part of a revolution of rising spiritual expectations. But the blacks are still concerned with the old material expectations. They are not insensitive to esthetics. Despite extremist behavior, for many of them right now the "quality of life" is something far simpler than it is to the white students: a better life, a better job--largely the products of material progress. Along with the Viet Nam War it was, after all, a demand for a betterment of the Negroes' condition that first spurred the young, and indeed the country, to the present reappraisal of itself.
The underdeveloped peoples abroad also want, and desperately need, the fruits of material progress. In seeking it they hope to profit further from Americans' successes, as well as from their failures and shortcomings. So, despite the pessimism about the limitations of material progress, which the paradoxes of the American experience have lately pointed up, it is unlikely that the world will abandon its pursuit. The present rebellion by the blacks and the young could still fragment American society beyond anything now imagined possible. The end result will more likely be a heightening consciousness, a raising of national sights. The new challenging target will be progress, understood in a broader and more sophisticated way to include not only materialist means but also the will and perception to put them to more moral and more civilizing ends.
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