The Reenchantment of the World (2 page)

Translated into everyday life, what does this disenchantment mean?
It means that the modern landscape has become a scenario of "mass
administration and blatant violence,"2 a state of affairs now clearly
perceived by the man in the street. The alienation and futility that
characterized the perceptions of a handful of intellectuals at the
beginning of the century have come to characterize the consciousness of
the common man at its end. Jobs are stupefying, relationships vapid and
and transient, the arena of politics absurd. In the vacuum created by the
collapse of traditional values, we have hysterical evangelical revivals,
mass conversions to the Church of the Reverend Moon, and a general retreat
into the oblivion provided by drugs, television, and tranquilizers. We
also have a desperate search for therapy, by now a national obsession,
as millions of Americans try to reconstruct their lives amidst a pervasive
feeling of anomie and cultural disintegration. An age in which depression
is a norm is a grim one indeed.
Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of this general malaise than the
inability of the industrial economies to provide meaningful work. Some
years ago, Herbert Marcuse described the blue- and white-collar classes in
America as "one-dimensional." "When technics becomes the universal form
of material production," he wrote, "it circumscribes an entire culture;
it projects a historical totality -- a 'world.'" One cannot speak of
alienation as such, he went on, because there is no longer a self to be
alienated. We have all been bought off, we all sold out to the System
long ago and now identify with it completely. 'People recognize themselves
in their commodities," Marcuse concluded; they have become what they own.3
Marcuse's is a plausible thesis. We all know the next-door neighbor who
is out there every Sunday, lovingly washing his car with an ardor that is
almost sexual. Yet the actual data on the day-to-day life of the middle
and working classes tend to refute Marcuse's notion that for these people,
self and commodities have merged, producing what he terms the "Happy
Consciousness." To take only two examples, Studs Terkel's interviews with
hundreds of Americans, drawn from all walks of life, revealed how hollow
and meaningless they saw their own vocations. Dragging themselves to work,
pushing themselves through the daily tedium of typing, filing, collecting
insurance premiums, parking cars, interviewing welfare applicants,
and largely fantasizing on the job -- these people, says Terkel, are no
longer characters out of Charles Dickens, but out of Samuel Beckett.4
The second study, by Sennett and Cobb, found that Marcuse's notion of
the mindless consumer was totally in error. The worker is not buying
goods because he identifies with the American Way of Life, but because
he has enormous anxiety about his self, which he feels possessions
might assuage. Consumerism is paradoxically seen as a way
out
of a
system that has damaged him and that he secretly despises; it is a way
of trying to keep
free
from the emotional grip of this system.5
But keeping free from the System is not a viable option. As technological
and bureaucratic modes of thought permeate the deepest recesses of our
minds, the preservation of psychic space has become almost impossible.6
"High-potential candidates for management positions in American
corporations customarily undergo a type of finishing-school education
that teaches them how to communicate persuasively, facilitate social
interaction, read body language, and so on. This mental framework is
then imported into the sphere of personal and sexual relations. One
thus learns, for example, how to discard friends who may prove to be
career obstacles and to acquire new acquaintances who will assist in
one's advancement. The employee's wife is also evaluated as an asset or
liability in terms of her diplomatic skills. And for most males in the
industrial nations, the sex act itself has literally become a project,
a matter of carrying out the proper techniques so as to achieve the
prescribed goal and thus win the desired approval. Pleasure and intimacy
are seen almostas a hindrance to the act. But once the ethos of technique
and management has permeated the spheres of sexuality and friendship,
there is literally no place left to hide. The "widespread climate of
anxiety and neurosis" in which we are immersed is thus inevitable.7

 

 

These details of the inner psychological landscape lay bare the
workings of the System most completely. In a study that purported to
be about schizophrenia, but that was for the most part a profile of
the psychopathology of everyday Life, R.D. Laing showed how the psyche
splits, creating false selves, in an attempt to protect itself from
all this manipulation.8 If we were asked to characterize our usual
relations with other persons, we might (as a first guess) describe them
as pictured in Figure 1 (see above). Here we have self and other in
direct interaction, engaging each other in an immediate way. As a result,
perception is real, action is meaningful, and the self feels embodied,
vital (enchanted). But as the discussion above clearly indicates, such
direct interaction almost never takes place. We are "whole" to almost no
one, least of all ourselves. Instead we move in a world of social roles,
interaction rituals, and elaborate game-playing that forces us to try
to protect the self by developing what Laing calls a "false-self system."

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Figure 2, the self has split in two, the "inner" self retreating from
the interaction and leaving the body -- now perceived as false, or dead
(disenchanted) -- to deal with the other in a way that is pure theater,
while the "inner" self looks on like a scientific observer. Perception
is thus unreal, and action correspondingly futile. As Laing points out,
we retreat into fantasies at work -- and in "love -- and establish a
false self (identified with the body and its mechanical actions) which
performs the rituals necessary for us to succeed in our tasks. This
process begins sometime during the third year of life, is rexnforced in
kindergarten and grammar school, continues on into the dreary reality
of high school, and finally becomes the daily fare of working life.9
Everyone, says Laing -- executives, physicians, waiters, or whatever --
playacts, manipulates, in order to avoid being manipulated himself. The
aim is the protection of the self, but since that self is in fact cut
off from any meaningful intercourse, it suffocates. The environment
becomes increasingly unreal as human beings distance themselves from the
events of their own lives. As this process accelerates, the self begins
to fight back, to nag itself (and thus create a further split) about the
existential guilt it has come to feel. We are haunted by our phoniness,
our playacting, our flight from trying to become what we truly are or
could be. As the guilt mounts, we silence the nagging voice with drugs,
alcohol, spectator sports -- anything to avoid facing the reality of
the situation. When the self-mystification we practice, or the effect of
the pills, wears off, we are left with the terror of our own betrayal,
and the emptiness of our manipulated "successes."

 

 

The statistics that reflect this condition in America alone are so grim
as to defy comprehension. There is now a significant suicide rate among
the seven-to-ten age group, and teenage suicides tripled between 1966 and
1976 to roughly thirty per day. More than half the patients in American
mental hospitals are under twenty-one. In 1977, a survey of nine- to
eleven-year-olds on the West Coast found that nearly half the children
were regular users of alcohol, and that huge numbers in this age group
regularly came to school drunk. Dr. Darold Treffert, of Wisconsin's Mental
Health Institute, observed that millions of children and young adults are
now plagued by a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a
fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will
happen to them." Official figures from government reports released during
1971-72 recorded that the United States has 4 million schizophrenics, 4
million seriously disturbed children, 9 million alcoholics, and 10 million
people suffering from severely disabling depression. In the early 1970s,
it was reported that 25 million adults were using Valium; by 1980, Food
and Drug Administration figures indicated that Americans were downing
benzodiazepines (the class of tranquilizers which includes Valium) at a
rate of 5 billion pills a year. Hundreds of thousands of the nation's
children, according to "The Myth of the Hyperactive Child" by Peter
Schrag and Diane Divoky (1975), are being drugged in the schools, and
one-fourth of the American female population in the thirty-to-sixty age
group uses psychoactive prescription drugs on a regular basis. Articles in
popular magazines such as "Cosmopolitan" urge sufferers from depression
to drop in to the local mental hospital for drugs or shock treatments,
so that they can return to their jobs as quickly as possible. "The drug
and the mental hospital," writes one political scientist, "have become
the indispensable lubricating oil and reservicing factory needed to
prevent the complete breakdown of the human engine."10

 

 

These figures are American in degree, but not in kind. Poland and
Russia are world leaders in the consumption of hard liquor; the
suicide rate in France has been growing steadily; in West Germany,
the suicide rate doubled between 1966 and 1976.11 The insanity of Los
Angeles and Pittsburgh is archetypal, and the "misery index" has been
climbing in Leningrad, Stockholm, Milan, Frankfurt and other cities
since midcentury. If America is the frontier of the Great Collapse,
the other industrial nations are not far behind.

 

 

It is an argument of this book that we are
not
witnessing a peculiar
twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberration that
can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of
empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome
of a logic that is already centuries old, and which is being played out
in our own lifetime. I am not trying to argue that science is the cause
of our predicament; causality is a type of historical explanation which
I find singularly unconvincing. What I am arguing is that the scientific
world view is
integral
to modernity, mass society, and the situation
described above. It is our consciousness, in the Western industrial
nations -- uniquely so -- and it is intimately bound up with the emergence
of our way of life from the Renaissance to the present. Science, and our
way of life, have been mutually reinforcing, and it is tor this reason
that the scientific world view has come under serious scrutiny at the
same time that the industrial nations are beginning to show signs of
severe strain, if not actual disintegration.

 

 

From this perspective, the transformations I shall be discussing, and the
solutions I dimly perceive, are epochal, and this is all the more reason
not to relegate them to the realm of theoretical abstraction. Indeed,
I shall argue that such fundamental transformations impinge upon the
details of our daily lives far more directly than the things we may think
to be most urgent: this Presidential candidate, that piece of pressing
legislation, and so on. There have been other periods in human history
when the accelerated pace of transformation has had such an impact on
individual lives, the Renaissance being the most recent example prior
to the present. During such periods, the meaning of individual lives
begins to surface as a disturbing problem, and people become preoccupied
with the meaning of meaning itself. It appears a necessary concomitant
of this preoccupation that such periods are characterized by a sharp
increase in the incidence of madness, or more precisely, of what is seen
to define madness.12 For value systems hold us (