Fuzzy Welcome to Cons. III

Sociology has spawned more games than Parker Brothers. But all the divertissements rest upon a single process --the breakup of phenomena into categories. It has been so ever since Auguste Comte invented the "science" and divided human progress into three stages, theological, metaphysical and positive. In recent times, the games people played included Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, U and non-U, Soul and no Soul. Now comes the first new pop-soc. parlor game of the '70s--Consciousness I, II and III.

Its creator, Charles A. Reich, is a professor of law at Yale. He offers the rules, and defines the three categories, in a new book called The Greening of America (Random House; $7.95) that is attracting major attention. The game will be won, says Reich, when enough of his fellow citizens enter Consciousness III. Then a change of heart and spirit will set in all over America, the sterile, gray industrial landscape will grow greener, and all our life-suppressing institutions will be peaceably transformed from within.

Reich's three categories are first presented historically as stages in a familiar pageant entitled, "How America went wrong . . . and the rebirth of human values that is emerging in the new generation." For Reich weighs the American past and finds it wanton. The Consciousness I period is associated with the young Jeffersonian Republic--freedom-loving, egalitarian, expansive, democratic, though lamentably competitive. Its spirit stifled slowly, as America evolved into another political caricature, the pinched, repressive, committee-loving, life-suppressing, reform-minded meritocracy, which Reich seems to regard as something very like Hell on Earth. Decisive moments in this decline into bondage were the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the technological revolution that occurred after World War II. The New Deal, says Reich, was based on high-minded attempts at reform, but instead of producing an altered democracy it simply created more rules and regulations. The eventual result was the Corporate State. An evolving byproduct has been Reich's Consciousness II. The overridingly glum characteristic of Consciousness II people is the resigned belief that man must suppress his individuality and improve the world by working through those burgeoning, inextricably allied institutions: Industry and Government.

Plaints and Visions. Consciousness I people, Reich observes, still persist and still see America as if it were a world of small towns and simple virtues. The membership includes "farmers, A.M.A.-type doctors, gangsters, Republicans and 'just plain folks,'" plus --one assumes--a Vice President or two. The folks in Consciousness II tend to be young doctors, idealistic lawyers, Kennedy men, believers in the New York Times editorial page, as well, presumably, as Ralph Nader and all his raiders. Unlike Consciousness I, Consciousness II people are aware of the erosion of the American Dream. But they are equally out of date. For they still seek and glorify "power, success, rewards, competence," above all the control of nature by man. They will have nothing to do with "awe, mystery, helplessness, magic."

For Reich, the hope of the present and the wave of the future is Consciousness III. There were a few early IIIs before the mid-1960s: among them Thoreau, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, J.D. Salinger. But now there are thousands, says Reich, eager to transform American society by a new, generous life-style and a direct commitment to simplicity, honesty and gentle comradeship. The revolution will be peaceable too, for anyone who believes in power and violence, says Reich, is not yet up to Consciousness III. Instead, Reich sees the young simply infiltrating and then inheriting the future. "The new consciousness will spread," he writes happily, "and whatever it gives life to --a university, a public school, a factory --will become more responsive to human needs."

In his visions, as in his plaints, Reich is a peculiar blend of Vance Packard and Pollyanna, a colloidal suspension of William Buckley, William Blake and Herbert Marcuse in pure applesauce. It can be justly said of Reich, as Dr. Johnson once said of Thomas Gray, that "he was dull, but he was dull in a new way, and that made people think him great."

Oh Wow! His heart, clearly, is in the right place. The problem lies in the clearness of his head. The power of the state does often seem largely beyond simple human control. Technology, indeed, can be more of a straitjacket than a servant to man. It is unarguably true that the law is often not only inhumane but serves as the implacable friend of wrongdoing. Reich makes these points, but in language so maddeningly overstated, so gratuitously contradictory, so alternately abusive and effusive that it would hardly do for a pot-scented post-midnight colloquy in a college dormitory.

Even in a good cause, Reich cannot be forgiven his verbal incense and record-jacket style. "Their clothes are earthy and sensual. Their bell-bottoms . . . give the ankles a special freedom as if to invite dancing right on the street," he writes of the joyfulness of the Consciousness III group. It has, he says, "rediscovered a childlike quality that it supremely treasures, to which it gives its ultimate sign of reverence, vulnerability and innocence, 'Oh Wow!' " Reich has little judgment and no fairness or consistency. He slightingly compares Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Rolling Stones' music. After angrily asserting that the Corporate State has destroyed soul-refreshing silence, he praises the omnipresence of the rock beat in America. He blithely assumes that once human priorities have been reordered, the technology that has simultaneously dehumanized man and led him to contemplate a Consciousness III existence will simply run by itself.

The students at Yale and their generation--to whom the book is dedicated --are too important to be so sloppily displayed at a notions counter; they need an abler witness than Charles Reich. The gropings of the young toward a natural piety and spiritual brotherhood in a time admittedly cut off from religion and nature may possibly be the single most significant struggle in recent U.S. history. But Reich's attempt to use historical perspective to lend the advent of Consciousness III sensibility a sense of Marxian inevitability is a failure. Perhaps this is because, while he pretends to exhaustive analysis, he deliberately ignores the one essential issue involved. The success or failure of a return to the Garden of Eden --even with Adam and Eve played by bright and well-favored Yale men and their dates--will depend not on the serpent state but upon human nature. Reich's simple assumption--borrowed unexamined from the Romantic movement--that man is inherently good until corrupted by society is simply a disastrous philosophical copout.

In the long run, Reich's book boils down to a conversation piece about categories I, II and III, and a simple assertion: the dinosaurs are perishing, and little furry animals will inherit the earth.

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