Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (117 page)

By then, thirty-nine nations had met in Rome in 1969 to discuss pollution. Their report,
The Limits to Growth,
concluded that ‘the hour was late,’ that at some stage in the next one hundred years the limit to growth would be reached, that the earth’s finite resources would be exhausted and there would be a ‘catastrophic’ decline in population and industrial capacity.
⁷⁵
Attempts to meet this looming problem should begin immediately. In the same year
Barbara Ward
and
René Dubos
presented a report to the United Nations World Conference on the Human Environment which, as its title,
Only One Earth,
showed, had much the same message.
⁷⁶
Nineteen-seventy saw the founding of the ‘Bauernkongress’ in Germany, and in 1973 ecology candidates first stood for election in France and Britain. These events coincided with the Yom Kippur War in 1973, as a result of which the OPEC cartel of oil-producing nations raised oil prices sharply, an oil crisis that forced gasoline rationing in several countries, the first time such measures had been necessary since World War II. It was this, as much as anything, that highlighted not just the finite nature of the earth’s resources, but that such limits to growth had political consequences.

Charles Reich,
an academic who taught at both Yale and Berkeley, claimed that the environmental revolution was more than just that; it was a true turning point in history, a pivot when human nature changed. In
The Greening of America
(1970), he argued that there existed, in America at any rate, three types of consciousness: ‘Consciousness I is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman and worker who is trying to get ahead. Consciousness II represents the values of an organisational society. Consciousness III is the new generation…. One was formed in the nineteenth century, the second in the first half of this century, the third is just emerging.’
⁷⁷

Beyond this division, Reich’s idea was a very clever piece of synthesis: he
related many works of popular culture to his arguments, explaining why particular songs or films or books had the power and popularity they did. He paid relatively little attention to Consciousness I but had great fun debunking Consciousness II, where his argument essentially followed on from Herbert Marcuse, in
One-Dimensional Man,
and W. H. Whyte’s
Organisation Man.
Since the mid-1950s, Reich said, that world had deteriorated; in addition to vast organisations, we now had the ‘corporate state,’ with widespread, anonymous, and in many cases seemingly arbitrary power. He argued that the works of Raymond Chandler, such as
The Big Sleep
or
Farewell My Lovely,
owed their appeal to their picture of a world in which no one could be trusted, where one could only survive by living on one’s wits. James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
pitted a young man against a vast, anonymous organisation (in this case the army), as did Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint.
The appeal of
Casablanca,
he said, lay in the fact that ‘Humphrey Bogart plays a man who could still change fate by taking action. Perhaps
Casablanca
was the last moment when most Americans believed that.’
⁷⁸

Reich showed how a large number of popular works took aim at one or other aspect of Consciousness II society, and tried to move on. In Stanley Kubrick’s
2001 : A Space Odyssey,
a space traveller is in what appears to be a hotel or motel room, expensive and plastic but lacking entirely anything he can do anything
with,
‘no work, nothing that asks a reaction.’
⁷⁹
‘Almost every portrayal of a man at work [in American films] shows him doing something that is clearly outside of modern industrial society [i.e., the corporate state]. He may be a cowboy, a pioneer settler, a private detective, a gangster, an adventure figure like James Bond, or a star reporter. But no films attempt to confer satisfaction and significance upon the ordinary man’s labour. By contrast, the novels of George Eliot, Hardy, Dickens, Howells, Garland and Melville deal with ordinary working lives, given larger meaning through art. Our artists, our advertisers and our leaders have not taught us how to work in our world.’
⁸⁰
The beginning of Consciousness III he took to be J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
(1951) but to gather force with the music and words of Bob Dylan, Cream, the Rolling Stones, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Dylan’s ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m only Bleeding),’ Reich said, was a far more powerful, and considerably earlier, social critique of police brutality than any number of sociological treatises. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ said more about alienation more succinctly than any psychologist’s offering. The same argument, he said, applied to such works as ‘Draft Morning’ by the Byrds,
Tommy
by the Who, or ‘I Feel Free’ by Cream. He thought that the drug culture, the mystical sounds of Procul Harum, and even bell-bottom trousers came together in a new idea of community (the bell-bottoms, he said, somewhat fancifully, left the ankles free, an invitation to dance). The works of authors like Ken Kesey, who wrote
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1979) about a revolt in a mental hospital, embodied the new consciousness, Reich said, and even Tom Wolfe, who in
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
(1965) was critical of many aspects of the new consciousness, at least conceded that subcultures like stock-car racing and surfing showed people
choosing
their own alternative
lifestyles, rather than simply accepting what was given them, as their parents had.

This all came together, Reich said, in the ‘green’ movement. Opposition to the Vietnam War was an added factor, but even there the underlying force behind the war was corporate America and technology; napalm destroyed the environment and the enemy almost equally. And so, along with a fear for the environment, a realisation that resources were finite, and a rejection of the corporate state, went an avoidance where possible of the technology that represented Consciousness II. People, Reich said, were beginning to choose to bake their own bread, or to buy only bread that was baked in environmentally friendly ways, using organically grown materials. He was in fact describing what came to be called the counterculture, which is explored in more detail in the next chapter. He wasn’t naïve; he did not think Consciousness II, corporate America, would just roll over and surrender, but he did believe there would be a growth of environment-conscious communes, green political parties, and a return to ‘vocations,’ as opposed to careers, with people devoting their lives to preserving areas of the world from the depredations of Consciousness II corporations.

A related argument came from the economist Fritz Schumacher in two books,
Small Is Beautiful
(1973) and
A Guide for the Perplexed
published in 1977, the year he died.
⁸¹
Born in Bonn in 1911, into a family of diplomats and academics, Schumacher was given a very cosmopolitan education by his parents, who sent him to the LSE in London and to Oxford. A close friend of Adam von Trott, executed for his part in the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, Schumacher was working in London in the late 1930s and spent the war in Britain, overcoming his enemy alien status. After the war, he became very friendly with Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh, economic advisers to Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s, and was appointed to a senior position on the National Coal Board (NCB). Very much his own man, Schumacher early on saw that the resources of the earth were finite, and that something needed to be done. For many years, however, he was not taken seriously because, in being his own man, he took positions that others regarded as outlandish or even as evidence of instability. He was a convinced believer in unidentified flying objects, flirted with Buddhism, and though he had rejected religion as a younger man, was received into the Catholic Church in 1971, at the age of sixty.
⁸²

Schumacher had spent his life travelling the world, especially to the poorer parts, such as Peru, Burma, and India. Gradually, as his religious feelings grew, as the environmental crisis around him deepened, and as he realised that the vast corporations of the West could not hope to offer solutions that would counter the poverty of so many third-world countries, he developed an alternative view. 1971 was for him a turning point. He had recently become president of the Soil Association in Britain (he was an avid gardener), he had been received into the church, and he had resigned from the NCB. He set about writing the book he had always wanted to write, provisionally called ‘The Homecomers,’ because his argument was that the world was reaching a crisis point. The central reality, as he saw it, was that the affluence of the West
was ‘an abnormality which “the signs of the times” showed was coming to an end.’ The inflation that had started to plague Western societies was one such sign. The party was over, said Schumacher, but ‘Whose party was it anyhow? That of a small minority of countries and, inside those countries, that of a minority of people.’
⁸³
This minority kept itself in power, as was to be expected, but the corporations did little to help the chronic poverty seen in the rest of the world. These countries could not go from their underdeveloped state to a sophisticated state overnight. What was needed, he said, was a number of small steps, which were manageable by the people on the ground – and here he introduced his concept of
intermediate technology.
There had been an Intermediate Technology Development Group in Britain since the mid-1960s, trying to develop technologies that were more efficient than traditional ones, in India, say, or South America, but far less complex than their counterparts in the developed West. (A classic example of this would be the clockwork radio, which works by being wound up rather than with batteries, which may not be obtainable in remote areas, or may weather badly.) By ‘The Homecomers’ he meant that people would in the future return to their homes from factories, go back to simpler technologies simply because they were more human and humane. The publishers didn’t like the tide and Anthony Blond came up with
Small Is Beautiful,
at the same time keeping Schumacher’s subtitle: ‘Economics – as if People Mattered.’ The book was published to a scattering of reviews, but it soon took off as word of mouth spread, and it became a cult from Germany to Japan.
⁸⁴
Schumacher had hit a nerve; his main focus was the third world, but it was clear that many people loathed the big corporations as much as he did and longed for a different way of life. Until his death in 1977, Schumacher was a world figure, feted by state governors in America, entertained at the White House by President Carter, welcomed in India as a ‘practical Gandhi.’ His underlying argument was that there
is
room on earth for everyone, provided that world affairs are managed properly. That management, however, was not an economic question but a moral one, which is why for him economics and religion went together, and why they were the most important disciplines.
⁸⁵
Schumacher’s arguments illustrated Reich’s Consciousness III at its most practical level.

Anxieties about the human influence on our planet accelerated throughout the 1970s, aided by a scare in Italy in 1976 when a massive cloud of dioxin gas escaped from a pesticide plant near Seveso, killing domestic and farm animals in the surrounding region. In 1978 the United States banned CFCs as spray propellants in order to reduce damage to the ozone layer, which normally filtered out ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This damage, it was believed, was causing global warming through the ‘greenhouse effect.’ In 1980 the World Climate Research Program was launched, a study specifically intended to explore human influence on climate and to predict what changes could be expected.

No one has been to the Moon for more than a quarter of a century. We have lost the universal sense of optimism in science that the Apollo program represented.

On Saturday, 6 October 1973, on the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a surprise attack on Israel was launched from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south. For forty-eight hours the very existence of Israel appeared threatened. Its ‘Bar-Lev’ line in Sinai was broken, and many of its military aircraft were destroyed on the ground by Arab missiles. Only the rapid response of the United States, sending more than $2 billion worth of arms inside two days, enabled Israel eventually to recoup its losses and then hit back and gain ground. When a ceasefire was declared on 24 October, Israeli forces were close enough to Damascus to shell it, and had a bridgehead on the Western bank of the Suez Canal.

But the Yom Kippur War, as it came to be called, was more than just a war. It was a catalyst that led directly and immediately to an event that Henry Kissinger, at the time the U.S. secretary of state, called ‘one of the pivotal events in the history of this century.’ In the very middle of the war, on 16 October, the Arab and several non-Arab oil-producing nations cut oil production, and raised prices 70 percent. Two days before Christmas, they raised them again, this time by 128 percent. Crude oil prices thus quadrupled in less than a year.
¹
No country was immune from this ‘oil crisis.’ Many poorer countries of Africa and Asia were devastated. In the West, petrol rationing was introduced in places like Holland for a while, and lines at gas stations became familiar everywhere. And it introduced a phenomenon not anticipated by Keynes – stagflation. Before the Yom Kippur War the average rate of growth in the developed West was 5.2 percent, comfortably ahead of the average rate of price increases of 4.1 percent. After the oil shock, growth was reduced to zero or even minus, but inflation rose to 10 or 12 percent.
²

The oil crisis, in historian Paul Johnson’s words, was ‘by far the most destructive economic event since 1945.’ But the oil-producing nations’ decision to raise prices and limit production were not only the result of the war or the fact that – in the end – they were defeated and lost territory as a result of America coming to Israel’s aid. The world’s economic structure was changing anyway, if less obviously. Ironically, the year of rebellion, 1968, when black and student violence had peaked in America, was also the time of the United States’ greatest economic influence. In that year, American production was more than
a third of the world total – 34 percent. But, like many success stories, this one hid within it incipient problems. Ever since 1949 the Communist Chinese had been worried that America might, in crisis, block any dollars they earned. They had therefore always kept their dollars in Paris. Over the years others had followed suit, and a market in ‘Eurodollars’ had grown up. In turn this spawned a Eurocredit and Eurobond market beyond the control of Washington, or anybody, helping to make money more volatile than it had ever been. Alongside this were two additional factors. One was the ecological sentiment that the earth was a finite resource, which translated into a steady rise in commodity prices. Second was a specific instance of this: from 1970, America’s own oil production peaked and then began to decline. In 1960 she had imported 10 percent of her oil; by 1973 that figure was 36 percent.
³
A major shift was taking place in the very nature of developed societies. It had been gathering pace, and visibility, throughout the 1960s, but it took a war to bring it home to everyone.

One of the first to reflect on this change, in his usual elegant way, was the economist J. K. Galbraith. In 1967 he released
The New Industrial State,
in which he described a new business-economic order that, he maintained, drastically changed the nature of traditional capitalism. His starting point was that the nature of the large business enterprise had altered fundamentally by the 1960s as compared with the start of the century.
⁴
Whereas the likes of Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, and Guggenheim had been entrepreneurs, taking huge risks to launch the companies that bore their names, by the time these companies had matured, they had changed character in two fundamental ways. In the first place, they were no longer run by one man, who was both a leader and a shareholder, but by managers – Galbraith actually called them the technostructure, for reasons that will become apparent – who owned a minority of shares. One important result of this, says Galbraith, is that the shareholders nowadays have only nominal control over the company that, in theory, they own, and this has significant psychological consequences for democracy. Second, mature companies, mass-producing expensive and complex products, in fact have very little interest in risk or competition. On the contrary they require political and economic stability so that demand, and the growth in demand, can (within certain limits) be predicted. The most important effect of this, Galbraith argued, is that mature corporations actually
prefer
planning in an economy. In traditional conservatism, planning smacks of socialism, Marxism, and worse, but in the modern world mature corporations, who operate in an oligopolistic situation, which to Galbraith is but a modified monopoly, cannot do without it.
⁵

Everything else in the new industrial state, says Galbraith, stems from these two facts. Demand is regulated, as Keynes showed, partly by the fiscal policy of governments – which presupposes a symbiotic relationship between the state and the corporation – and by devices such as advertising (which, Galbraith believes, has had an incalculably ‘dire’ effect on the truthfulness of modern society, to the point where we no longer notice how routinely dishonest we are). An additional characteristic of modern industrial society, Galbraith says, is
that more and more important decisions depend on information possessed by more than one individual. Technology has a great deal to do with this. One consequence is a new kind of specialism: people who have no special skills in the traditional sense but instead have a new skill – knowing how to evaluate information. Thus information becomes important in itself, and people who can handle information constitute an ‘insider class,’ the managers or technostructure, alongside an ‘outsider class,’ the shareholders.
⁶
Galbraith clearly thought this distinction was more important than, in practice, it turned out to be (though for a while, in the 1980s, ‘insider trading’ was a scandal that contaminated business life on both sides of the Atlantic). One effect of all this, he said, was to change the business experience. Instead of being rugged, individualistic, competitive, and risk-taking, executive life became highly secure; when Galbraith wrote his book, recent studies had shown that in America three-quarters of executives surveyed had been with their company more than twenty years. Affluence plays a part, says Galbraith, because the further a man is from the breadline – the more affluent he is – the more his desires may be manipulated, and the bigger the role of advertising, and here it was fortunate that the rise of radio and then television coincided with the maturation of corporations and the rise of affluence.
⁷

But Galbraith’s aim was not simply to describe the new arrangement, important though that was. With an appropriate sense of mischief, he observed how the technostructure, the management of the mature corporations, presents itself. Far from telling the truth about the new state of play, where in fact the corporations rule the roost, the technostructure pays lip service to the idea that the ‘consumer is king.’ The real truth, that the corporation has pretty near total control over prices and a good grasp on the control of demand, goes by the board.
⁸
Galbraith’s next point was that the nature of unemployment was changing – indeed, in a sense, it was starting to lose any meaning; ‘More and more, the figures on unemployment enumerate those who are currently unemployable by the industrial system.’
⁹
This has a domino effect among the unions, who lose power, and the educational and scientific ‘estates,’ which gain it. Galbraith was undoubtedly correct in his analysis of the relative powers of the unions, the education services, and the scientists; where he was wrong was that he expected the latter two estates to acquire a political force, as the unions had been hitherto. This didn’t happen. He also thought that scientists working for private companies would become a voice in society. That didn’t happen either.

After a swipe at the defence industry, examining how the Cold War actually helped economies in a Keynesian sense (though traditional conservatives denied it), Galbraith suddenly changed tack completely and considered what he called the ‘aesthetic experience.’ The world of artists, he says, is quite unlike that of the technostructure: ‘Artists do not come in teams.’ Athens, Venice, Agra, and Samarkand are quite unlike Nagoya, Düsseldorf, Dagenham, or Detroit and always will be. He saw it as the role of artists to attack and criticise the technostructure; there is, he says, an inevitable struggle: ‘Aesthetic achievement is beyond the reach of the industrial system and, in substantial measure, in conflict with it. There would be little need to stress the conflict were it not
part of the litany of the industrial system that none exists.’
¹⁰
Galbraith felt that aesthetic goals would ultimately prevail over industrial ones.

But the main argument of
The New Industrial State
was that traditional capitalism had changed out of all recognition and that traditional capitalists lied about that change, pretending it just hadn’t happened. At the time his book went to press, Galbraith said, Boeing ‘sells 65 percent of its output to the government; General Dynamics sells a like percentage; Raytheon … sells 70 percent; Lockheed … sells 81 percent; and Republican Aviation … sells 100 percent.’
¹¹
‘The future of the industrial system is not discussed partly because of the power it exercises over belief. It has succeeded, tacitly, in excluding the notion that it is a transitory, which would be to say that it is a somehow imperfect, phenomenon…. Among the least enchanting words in the business lexicon are planning, government control, state support and socialism. To consider the likelihood of these in the future would be to bring home the appalling extent to which they are already a fact. And it would not be ignored that these grievous things have arrived, at a minimum with the acquiescence and, at a maximum, on the demand, of the system itself.’ And finally: ‘There is no natural presumption in favour of the market; given the growth of the industrial system the presumption is, if anything, the reverse. And to rely on the market where planning is required is to invite a nasty mess.
¹²
Galbraith’s was a spirited attack, making some uncomfortable points about the way capitalism had developed, and presented itself. He foresaw the increased role of science, the overwhelming importance of information and the changing nature of unemployment and the skills that would be needed in the future.

What Galbraith missed, Daniel Bell brought centre stage. In his study of Bell, Malcolm Waters describes how in 1973 both men featured in a list compiled by the sociologist Charles Kadushin, who had carried out a survey to discover which individuals were regarded as America’s intellectual elite. Among the top ten were Noam Chomsky, J. K. Galbraith himself, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, with Hannah Arendt and David Riesman further down, and W. H. Auden and Marshall McLuhan even lower. There was just one sociologist in the top ten: Daniel Bell.

Bell’s
End of Ideology
was covered in chapter 25, on the new psychology of affluence. In 1975 and again a year later, he came up with two more ‘big ideas.’ The first was summed up in the title of his book
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
For Bell, life is divided into three ‘realms’ – nature, technology, and society – that determine the basics of experience. History is also divided into three. Pre-industrial society may be seen as ‘a game against nature,’ the attempt to extract resources from the natural environment, where the main activities are hunting, foraging, farming, fishing, mining, and forestry.
¹³
Industrial society is ‘a game against fabricated nature,’ centring on human—machine relationships, and with economic activity focusing on the ‘manufacturing and processing of tangible goods,’ the central occupations being the semiskilled factory worker and engineer.
¹⁴
A post-industrial society is a ‘game between persons,’ ‘in which an “intellectual technology,” based on information, rises alongside machine technology.’
¹⁵
Post-industrial society centres around industries from three
sectors – transportation and utilities; finance and capital exchange; health, education, research, public administration, and leisure. Among all these, says Bell, scientists ‘are at the core’: ‘Given that the generation of information is the key problem and that science is the most important source of information, the organisation of the institutions of science, the universities and research institutes is the central problem in the post-industrial society. The strength of nations is given in their scientific capacity.’
¹⁶
As a result the character of work has changed, focusing now on relationships between people rather than between people and objects; ‘the expansion of the service sector provides a basis for the economic independence of women that was not previously available’; the post-industrial society is meritocratic; there is a change in scarcity – ‘scarcity of goods disappears in favour of scarcity of information and time.’ Finally Bell identifies something he labels a
situs,
a ‘vertical order of society as opposed to a horizontal one,’ such as classes. Bell identifies four functional situses (scientific, technological, administrative, and cultural) and five institutional ones (business, government, university/research, social welfare, and military), a division that would be eerily paralleled in the organisation of e-mail (see chapter 42). Besides the situses, however, Bell identifies a ‘knowledge class’ (of, mainly, scientists). He points out, for example, that whereas only about a quarter of first degrees in the United States are in science, more than half the doctorates are in natural science and mathematics.
¹⁷
This knowledge class is crucial to the success of the postindustrial society, but Bell remained uncertain as to whether it would ever act
as a class
in the Marxist sense, because it would probably never have enough independence to undermine capitalism.
*