The Lost Massey Lectures (17 page)

All such cultural and planning activities, including the sociology of the urban services, ought to be the concern of the land-grant college. At present in the United States we have pathetically perverted this beautiful institution. The land-grant college, for “mechanics and agriculture,” was subsidized to provide cultural leadership for its region, just as the academic university was supposed to be international and to teach humanities and humane professions. But now our land-grant and other regional colleges have lost their community function and become imitations of the academic schools, usually routine and inadequate, while the academic universities have alarmingly been corrupted to the interests of the nation and the national corporations. Naturally, the more its best young are trained to be personnel of the urban system, the more the country is depleted of brains and spirit.

(5) The fruition of rural reconstruction would consist of two things: a strong co-operative movement and a town-meeting democracy that makes sense, in its own terms, on big regional and national issues. A century ago Tocqueville spoke with admiration of how the Americans formed voluntary associations to run society; they were engaged citizens. This would seem to be the natural
tendency of independent spirits conscious of themselves as socially important; they can morally afford to pool their resources for their own purposes. At present it is dismaying to see individual farmers, almost on the margin, each buying expensive machinery to use a few days a year, and all totally unable to co-operate in processing or distribution. They are remarkably skillful men in a dozen crafts and sciences, but they are like children. They feel that they do not count for anything. And unable to co-operate with one another, they cannot compete and they do not count for anything. Correspondingly, their political opinions, which used to be stubbornly sensible though narrow, are frightened, and parrot the national rhetoric as if they never engaged in dialogue and had no stake of their own.

To sum up, in the United States the excessive urbanization certainly cannot be thinned out in this generation and we are certainly in for more trouble. In some urban functions, perhaps, like schooling, housing, and the care of mental disease, thinning out by even a few percent would be useful; and the country could help in this and regain some importance in the big society, which is urban. Nevertheless, the chief advantage of rural reconstruction is for its own sake, as an alternative way of life. It could develop a real countervailing power because it is relatively independent; it is not like the orthodox pluralism of the sociologists that consists of differences that make no difference because the groups depend on one another so tightly that they form a consensus willy-nilly.

The Scandinavian countries are a good model for us. By public policy over a century and a half, they have maintained a high rural ratio; for a century they have supported a strong co-operative
movement; and they have devised a remarkably various and thoughtful system of education. These things are not unrelated, and they have paid off in the most decent advanced society that there is, with a countervailing mixed economy, a responsible bureaucracy, and vigilant citizens.

Americans believe that the great background conditions of modern life are beyond our power to influence. The abuse of technology is autonomous and cannot be checked. The galloping urbanization is going to gallop on. Our over-centralized administration, both of things and men, is impossibly cumbersome and costly, but we cannot cut it down to size. These are inevitable tendencies of history. More dramatic inevitabilities, in the popular belief, are the explosions, the scientific explosion and the population explosion. And there are more literal explosions, the dynamite accumulating in the slums of a thousand cities and the accumulating stockpiles of nuclear bombs in nations great and small. Our psychology, in brief, is that history is out of control. It is no longer something that we make but something that happens to us. Politics is not prudent steering in difficult terrain,
but it is—and this is the subject of current political science—how to get power and keep power, even though the sphere of effective power is extremely limited and it makes little difference who is in power. The psychology of historical powerlessness is evident in the reporting and the reading of newspapers: there is little analysis of how events are building up, but we read—with excitement, spite, or fatalism, depending on our characters—the headlines of crises for which we are unprepared. Statesmen cope with emergencies, and the climate of emergency is chronic.

I have been trying to show that some of these historical conditions are not inevitable at all but are the working out of willful policies that aggrandize certain interests and exclude others, that subsidize certain styles and prohibit others. But of course,
historically
, if almost everybody believes the conditions are inevitable, including the policy makers who produce them, then they are inevitable. For to cope with emergencies does not mean, then, to support alternative conditions, but further to support and institutionalize the same conditions. Thus, if there are too many cars, we build new highways; if administration is too cumbersome, we build in new levels of administration; if there is a nuclear threat, we develop anti-missile missiles; if there is urban crowding and anomie, we step up urban renewal and social work; if there are ecological disasters because of imprudent use of technology, we subsidize Research and Development by the same scientific corporations working for the same ecologically irrelevant motives; if there is youth alienation, we extend and intensify schooling; if the nation-state is outmoded as a political form, we make ourselves into a mightier nation-state.

In this self-proving round, the otherwise innocent style of input-output economics, games-theory strategy, and computerized social science becomes a trap. For the style dumbly accepts the self-proving program and cannot compute what is not mentioned.
Then the solutions that emerge ride even more roughshod over what has been left out. Indeed, at least in the social sciences, the more variables one can technically compute, the less likely it is that there will be prior thinking about their import, rather than interpretation of their combination. Our classic example—assuming that there will be a future period to which we provide classic examples—is Herman Kahn on Thermonuclear War.

In this lecture, therefore, I will no longer talk about the error of believing that our evils are necessary, but stick to the more interesting historical fact of that belief. What is the psychology of feeling that one is powerless to alter basic conditions? What is it as a way of being in the world? Let me list half a dozen kinds of responses to being in a chronic emergency; unfortunately, in America they are exhibited in rather pure form. I say unfortunately, because a pure response to a chronic emergency is a neurotic one; healthy human beings are more experimental or at least muddling. Instead of politics, we now have to talk psychotherapy.

By definition, governors cannot forfeit the symbol that everything is under control, though they may not think so. During President Kennedy's administration, Arthur Schlesinger expressed the problem poignantly by saying, “One simply
must
govern.” The theme of that administration was to be “pragmatic”; but by this they did not mean a philosophical pragmatism, going toward an end in view from where one in fact is and with the means one has; they meant turning busily to each crisis as it arose, so that it was clear that one was not inactive. The criticism of Eisenhower's administration was that it was stagnant. The new slogan was “get America moving.”

This was rather pathetic; but as the crises have become deeper, the response of the present administration is not pathetic but, frankly, delusional and dangerous. It is to
will
to be in control, without adjusting to the realities. They seem to imagine that they will in fact buy up every economy, police the world, social-engineer the cities, school the young. In this fantasy they employ a rhetoric of astonishing dissociation between idea and reality, far beyond customary campaign oratory. For example, they proclaim that they are depolluting streams, but they allot no money; forty “demonstration cities” are to be made livable and show the way, but the total sum available is $1.5 billion (we saw that Mayor Lindsay asked for $50 billion for New York alone); the depressed area of Appalachia has been reclaimed, but the method is an old highway bill under another name; poor people will run their own programs, but any administrator is fired if he tries to let them; they are suing for peace, but they despatch more troops and bombers. This seems to be just lying but, to my ear, it is nearer to magic thinking. The magic buoys up the self-image; the activity is either nothing at all or brute force to make the problem vanish.

In between the ideality and the brutality there occurs a lot of obsessional warding off of confusion by methodical calculations that solve problems in the abstract, in high modern style. A precise decimal is set beyond which the economy will be inflationary, but nobody pays any mind to it. We know at what average annual income how many peoples cause what percentage of disturbances. A precise kill-ratio is established beyond which the Viet Cong will fold up, but they don't. Polls are consulted for the consensus, like the liver of sheep, without noticing signs of unrest and even though the administration keeps committing itself to an irreversible course that allows for no choice. And they are everlastingly righteous.

In more insane moments, however, they manufacture history
out of the whole cloth, so there is no way of checking up at all. They create incidents in order to exact reprisals; they invent (and legislate about) agitators for demonstrations and riots that are spontaneous; they project bogey-men in order to arm to the teeth. Some of this, to be sure, is cynical, but that does not make it less mad; for, clever at it or not, they still avoid the glaring realities of world poverty, American isolation, mounting urban costs, mounting anomie, and so forth. I do not think the slogan, “The Great Society,” is cynical; it is delusional.

Perhaps the epitome of will operating in panic—like a case from a textbook in abnormal psychology—has been the government's handling of the assassination of John Kennedy. The Warren Commission attempted to “close” the case, to make it not exist in the public mind. Thus it hastily drew firm conclusions from dubious evidence, disregarded counter-evidence, defied physical probabilities, and even may have accepted manufactured evidence. For a temporary lull it has run the risk of total collapse of public trust that may end up in a Dreyfus case.

Common people, who do not have to govern, can let themselves feel powerless and resign themselves. They respond with the familiar combination of not caring and, as a substitute, identifying with those whom they fancy to be powerful. This occurs differently, however, among the poor and the middle class.

The poor simply stop trying, become dependent, drop out of school, drop out of sight, become addicts, become lawless. It seems to be a matter of temperature or a small incident whether or not they riot. As I have said before, in anomic circumstances it is hard to tell when riot or other lawlessness is a political act toward a new set-up and when it is a social pathology. Being powerless as
citizens, poor people have little meaningful structure in which to express, or know, what they are after. The concrete objects of their anger make no political sense: they are angry at themselves or their own neighborhoods, at white people passing by, at Jewish landlords and shopkeepers. More symbolic scapegoats like either “the capitalist system” or “communism” do not evoke much interest. One has to feel part of a system to share its bogey-men or have a counter-ideology, and by and large the present-day poor are not so much exploited as excluded.

But to fill the void, they admire, and identify with, what is strong and successful, even if—perhaps especially if—it is strong and successful at their own expense. Poor Spanish youth are enthusiastic about our mighty bombs and bombers, though of course they have no interest in the foreign policy that uses them. (If anything, poor people tend to be for de-escalation and peace rather than war.) Readers of the
Daily News
are excited by the dramatic confrontation of statesmen wagging fingers at each other. Negroes in Harlem admire the Cadillacs of their own corrupt politicians and racketeers. Currently there is excitement about the words “Black Power,” but the confusion about the meaning is telling: in the South, where there is little Negro anomie, Black Power has considerable political meaning; in the northern cities it is a frantic abstraction. Similarly, the contrary word “Integration” makes economic and pedagogic sense if interpreted by people who have some feeling of freedom and power, but if interpreted by resentment and hopelessness it turns into a fight for petty victories or spite, which are not political propositions, though they may be good for the soul.

The anomie of middle-class people, on the other hand, appears rather as their privatism; they retreat to their families and consumer goods where they still have some power and choice. It is always necessary to explain to non-Americans that
middle-class Americans are not so foolish and piggish about their Standard of Living as it seems; it is that the Standard of Living has to provide all the achievement and value that are open to them. But it is a strange thing for a society to be proud of its Standard of Living, rather than taking it for granted as a background for worthwhile action.

Privacy is purchased at a terrible price of anxiety, excluding, and pettiness, the need to delete anything different from oneself and to protect things that are not worth protecting. Nor can they be protected; few of the suburban homes down the road, that look so trim, do not have cases of alcoholism, insanity, youngsters on drugs, or in jail for good or bad reasons, ulcers, and so forth. In my opinion, middle-class squeamishness and anxiety, a kind of obsessional neurosis, are a much more important cause of segregation than classical race-prejudice which is a kind of paranoia that shows up most among failing classes, bankrupt small property owners, and proletarians under competitive pressure. The squeamishness is worse, for it takes people out of humanity, whereas prejudice is at least passionate. Squeamishness finally undercuts even the fairness and decency that we expect from the middle class.