Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (88 page)

Speculating on the sixty-year gap between takeoff and maturity, Rostow puts this down to the time needed for the arithmetic of compound interest to take effect and/or for three generations of individuals to live under a regime where growth is the normal condition. In the fifth stage, the age of high mass consumption, there is a shift to durable consumer goods – cars, refrigerators, other electrically powered household gadgets.
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There is also the emergence of a welfare state.
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But
The Stages
was a book of its time in other senses than that
it followed Galbraith. This was the height of the Cold War (the Berlin Wall would go up in the Following year, with the Cuban missile crisis a year after that), and the arms race was at its height, the space race beginning in earnest. Rostow clearly saw his stages as an alternative, and better, analysis of social and economic change than Marxism, and he considered the stages of growth to be partly related to war. Rostow observed three kinds of war: colonial wars, regional wars, and the mass wars of the twentieth century.
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Wars tended to occur, he said, when societies, or countries, were changing from one stage of growth to another – war both satisfied and encouraged the energies being unleashed at these times. Conversely, countries that were stagnating, as France and Britain were after World War II, became targets of aggression for expanding powers. His most important point, certainly in the context of the times when his book appeared, but still of great interest, was that the shift into high mass consumption was the best hope for peace
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– not only because it created very satisfied societies who would not want to make war, but also because they had more to lose in an era of weapons of mass destruction. He noted that the USSR spent far too much on defence to allow its citizens to profit properly from consumer goods, and he hoped its citizens would one day realise how these two facts were related and prevail on their governments to change.
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Rostow’s analysis and predictions were borne out – but not until more than a quarter of a century had elapsed.

Rostow’s view was therefore fundamentally optimistic, more optimistic certainly than Galbraith’s. Other critics’ were much less so. One of Galbraith’s main points in the analytic section of his book was the relatively new importance of advertising, in creating the wants that the private consumer goods were intended to satisfy. Almost simultaneously with his book, an American journalist-turned-social-critic published three volumes that took a huge swipe at the advertising industry, expanding and amplifying Galbraith’s argument, examining the ‘intersection of power, money and writing.’ Vance Packard called his trilogy
The Hidden Persuaders
(1957),
The Status Seekers
(1959), and
The Waste Makers
(1960). All of them reached the number-one slot in the
New York Times
best-seller list, in the process transforming Packard’s own fortunes. He had lost his job just before Christmas 1956 when the magazine he wrote for,
Collier’s,
folded.
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In early 1957 he had taken his first unemployment cheque but already had a manuscript with the publishers. This manuscript had an odd life. In the autumn of 1954
Reader’s Digest
magazine had given Packard an assignment, which he later said ‘they apparently had lying around,’ on the new psychological techniques then being used in advertising. Packard researched the article, wrote it, but then learned that the
Digest
had ‘recently broken its long-standing tradition and decided to begin carrying advertisements. Subsequently, he was paid for his article, but it never appeared, and he was outraged when he learned there was a connection between the decision not to publish his piece and the magazine’s acceptance of advertising, the subject of his attack.’
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He thus turned the article into a book.

The main target of Packard’s attack was the relatively new technique of motivational research (MR), which relied on intensive interviewing, psychoanalytic
theory, and qualitative analysis, and in which sex often figured prominently. As Galbraith had emphasised, many people did not question advertising – they thought it important in helping fuel the demand on which mass society’s prosperity was based. In 1956 the prominent MR advocate Ernest Dichter had announced, ‘Horatio Alger is dead. We do not any longer really believe that hard work and savings are the only desirable things in life; yet they remain subconscious criteria of our feeling of morality.’ For Dichter, consumption had to be linked to pleasure, consumers had to be shown that it was ‘moral’ to enjoy life. This should be reflected in advertising.
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Packard’s main aim in
The Hidden Persuaders
was to show – via a catalogue of case histories – that American consumers were little more than ‘mindless zombies’ manipulated by the new psychological techniques. In one revealing case, for example, he quoted a marketing study by Dichter himself.
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Headed ‘Mistress versus Wife,’ this was carried out for the Chrysler Corporation and explored why men bought sedans even though they preferred sporty models. The report argued that men were drawn into automobile showrooms by the flashy, sporty types in the window, but actually
bought
less flashy cars, ‘just as he once married a plain girl.’ ‘Dichter urged the auto maker to develop a hardtop, a car that combined the practical aspects men sought in a wife with the sense of adventure they imagined they would find in a mistress.’
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Packard believed that MR techniques were antidemocratic, appealing to the irrational, mind-moulding on a grand scale. Such techniques applied to politics could take us nearer to the world of
1984
and
Animal Farm
and, Packard thought, following Riesman, that the ‘other-directed’ types of mass society were most at risk. Advertising not only helped along the consumer society, it stopped people achieving autonomy.

Packard’s second book,
The Status Seekers,
was less original, attacking the way advertising used status and people’s fears over loss of status to sell goods.
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His more substantial point was that, just then in America, there was much debate over whether the country was really less class-ridden than Europe, or had its own system, based more on material acquisitions rather than heredity. (This also was an issue that Galbraith had raised.) Packard advanced the view that business was essentially hypocritical in its stance. On the one hand, it claimed that the wider availability of the consumer products it was selling made America less divided; on the other, one of its major methods of selling used exactly these differences in status – and anxiety over those differences – as a device for promoting the sales of goods. His third book,
The Waste Makers,
used as its starting point a 1957 paper by a Princeton undergraduate, William Zabel, on planned obsolescence, in other words the deliberate manipulation of taste so that goods would seem out of date – and therefore be replaced – long before they were physically exhausted.
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This last book was probably Packard’s most overstated case; even so, analysis of his correspondence showed that many people were already disenchanted by the underlying nature of mass consumer society but felt so atomised they didn’t know what to do about it. As he himself was to put it later, the people who wrote to him were members of ‘The Lonely Crowd.’
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Naturally, the business community didn’t relish these attacks; as an editorial in
Life
put it, ‘Some of our recent books have been scaring the pizazz out of us with the notion of the Lonely Crowd … bossed by a Power Elite … flim-flammed by hidden persuaders and emasculated into a neuter drone called the Organisational Man.’
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One general notion underpinned and linked these various ideas. It was that, as a result of changes in the workplace and the creation of mass society, and as a direct consequence of World War II and the events leading up to it, a new socio-politico-psychology, a new human condition, was abroad. The traditional sources from which people took their identity had changed, bringing new possibilities but also new problems. Riesman, Mills, Galbraith, and the others had each chipped away, sculpting part of the picture, but it was left to another man to sum it all up, to describe this change of epoch in the language it deserved.

Daniel Bell was born in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1919 and grew up in the garment district in a family that had migrated from Bialystok, between Poland and Russia (the family name was Bolotsky). Bell was raised in such poverty, he says, that there was ‘never any doubt’ that he would become a sociologist, in order to explain what he saw to himself. At the City College of New York he joined a reading group that included Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Howe, all well-known sociologists and social critics. Some were Trotskyists, though most later changed their beliefs and formed the backbone of the neoconservative movement. Bell also worked as a journalist, editing the
New Leader,
then at
Fortune
with Whyte, but he also had a stint at the end of the war as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, with David Riesman, and moonlighted as a sociology lecturer at Columbia from 1952–1956. He later joined Columbia full time before moving on to Harvard, in 1965 founding
The Public Interest
with Irving Kristol as a place to rehearse the great public debates.
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It was while he was moonlighting at Columbia that he produced the work for which he first became known to the world outside sociology. This was
The End of Ideology.

In 1955 Bell attended the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Milan, where several notable liberal and conservative intellectuals addressed a theme set by Raymond Aron, ‘The End of the Ideological Age?’ Among those present, according to Malcolm Waters, in his assessment of Bell, were Edward Shils, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Hugh Gaitskell, Max Beloff, J. K. Galbraith, José Ortega y Gassett, Sidney Hook, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Bell’s contribution was a lecture on America as a mass society. The ‘End of Ideology’ debate – which would recur in several forms during the rest of the century – was seen originally by Aron as a good thing because he thought that ideologies prevent the building of a progressive state. In particular, Aron identified nationalism, liberalism, and Marxist socialism as the three dominant ideologies that, he said, were crumbling: nationalism because states were weakening as they became interdependent, liberalism because it could offer no ‘sense of community or focus for commitment,’ and
Marxism because it was false.
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Bell’s contribution was to argue that this whole process had gone further, faster, in the United States. For him, ideology was not only a set of governing ideas but ideas that were ‘infused with passion,’ and sought ‘to transform the whole way of life.’ Ideologies therefore take on some of the characteristics of a secular religion but can never replace real religion because they do not address the great existential questions, particularly death. For Bell, ideologies had worked throughout the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth because they helped offer moral guidance and represented real differences between the various interest groups and classes in society. But those differences had been eroded over the years, thanks to the emergence of the welfare state, the violent oppression carried out by socialist regimes against their populations, and the emergence of new stoic and existential philosophies that replaced the romantic ideas of the perfectibility of human nature.
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Mass society, for Bell and for the United States at least, was a society of abundance and optimism where traditional differences were minimised and a consensus of views had emerged. The blood, sweat, and tears had gone out of politics.
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Bell wasn’t seeking a prescription, merely attempting to describe what he saw as an epochal change in society, where its members were no longer governed by dominant ideas. Like Fromm or Mills he was identifying a new form of life coming into being. We are now apt to take that society for granted, especially if we are too young to have known anything else.

Few if any of these writers were associated intimately with any political party, but the majority were, for a time at least, of the left rather than of the right. The equality of effort demanded from all sections of society in wartime had a powerful significance that was much more than symbolic. This was reflected not only in the creation and provisions of the welfare state but in all the analyses of mass society, which accepted implicitly that all individuals had an equal right to the rewards that life had to offer. This equality was also part of the new human condition.

But was that justified? Michael Young, a British educationalist, an arch innovator, and a friend and colleague of Daniel Bell, produced a satire in 1958 that poked fun at some of these cherished assumptions.
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The Rise of the Meritocracy
was ostensibly set in 2034 and was cast as an ‘official’ report written in response to certain ‘disturbances’ that, to begin with, are not specified.
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The essence of the satire is that the hereditary principle in life has been abolished, to be replaced by one of merit (IQ+Effort=Merit), with the ‘aristocracy’ replaced by a ‘meritocracy.’ Interestingly, Young found it very difficult to publish the book – it was turned down by eleven publishers.
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One suggested that it would only be worth publishing if it were rewritten as a satire like
Animal Farm
(as if
that
had been easy to publish). Young did rewrite the book as a satire, but even so the publisher still declined to take it on. Young was also criticised for coining a term, meritocracy, that had both a Greek and a Latin root. In the end the book was published by a friend at Thames & Hudson, but
only as an act of friendship – whereupon
The Rise
promptly sold several hundred thousand copies.
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