The Lost Massey Lectures (9 page)

I am eager, as well as honored, to be talking to a Canadian audience on the state of American society, and especially to the Canadian young. You people are not yet so wrongly committed as we. Your land is less despoiled, your cities are more manageable, you are not yet so sold on mass mis-education. You are not in the trap of militarism. A large minority of you are deeply skeptical of American methods and oppose the unquestioned extension of American power. Some of us Americans have always wistfully hoped that you Canadians would teach us a lesson or two, though, to be frank, you have usually let us down.

In these lectures on our ambiguous position, I shall have to talk a good deal about style. To illustrate the current style of American enterprise, let me analyze a small, actual incident. It is perfectly typical, banal; no one would raise his eyebrows at it, it is business as usual.

Washington has allotted several billions of dollars to the schools. The schools are not teaching very well, but there is no chance that anybody will upset the apple-cart and ask if so much doing of lessons is the right way to educate the young altogether. Rather, there is a demand for new “methods” and mechanical equipment, which will disturb nobody, and electronics is the latest thing that every forward-looking local school board must be proud to buy. So to cut in on this melon, electronics corporations,
IBM
, Xerox, etc., have hastened to combine with, or take over, textbook houses. My own publisher, Random House, has been bought up by the Radio Corporation of America.

Just now, General Electric and Time, Inc., that owns a textbook house, have put nearly 40 millions into a joint subsidiary called General Learning. And an editor of
Life
magazine has been relieved of his duties for five weeks, in order to prepare a prospectus on the broad educational needs of America and the world, to come up with exciting proposals, so that General Learning can move with purpose into this unaccustomed field. The editor has collected and is boning up on the latest High Thought on education, and in due course he invites me to lunch, to pick my brains for something new and radical. “The sky,” he assures me, “is the limit.” (I am known, let me explain, as a severe critic of the school establishment.) “Perhaps,” he tells me at lunch, “there
is
no unique place for General Learning. They'll probably end up as prosaic makers of school hardware. But we ought to give it a try.”

Consider the premises of this odd situation, where first they have the organization and the technology, and then they try to dream up a use for it. In the 18th century, Adam Smith thought that one started with the need and only then collected capital to satisfy it. In the 19th century there was already a lot of capital to invest, but by and large the market served as a check, to guarantee utility, competence, and relevance. Now, however, the subsidy removes the check of the market and a promotion can expand like weeds in a well-manured field. The competence required is to have a big organization and sales force, and to be
in
, to have the prestige and connections plausibly to get the subsidy. Usually it is good to have some minimal relation to the ostensible function, e.g. a textbook subsidiary related to schooling or
Time-Life
related to, let us say, learning. But indeed, when an expanding corporation becomes
very
grand, it generates an expertise of its
own called Systems Development, applicable to anything. For example, as an expert in Systems Development, North American Aviation is hired to reform the penal system of California; there is no longer need to demonstrate acquaintance with any particular human function.

Naturally, with the divorce of enterprise from utility and competence, there goes a heavy emphasis on rhetoric and public relations to prove utility and competence. So an editor must be re-assigned for five weeks to write a rationale. It is his task to add ideas or talking points to the enterprise, like a wrapper. The personnel of expanding corporations, of course, are busy people and have not had time to think of many concrete ideas; they can, however, phone writers and concerned professionals. Way-out radicals, especially, do a lot of thinking, since they have little practical employment. And since the enterprise is free-floating anyway, it is dandy to include, in the prospectus, something daring, or even meaningful. (Incidentally, I received no fee, except the lunch and pleasant company; but I did pick up an illustration for these lectures.)

In an affluent society that can afford it, there is something jolly about such an adventure of the electronics giant, the mighty publisher, the National Science Foundation that has made curriculum studies, and local school boards that want to be in the swim. Somewhere down the line, however, this cabal of decision-makers is going to coerce the time of life of real children and control the activity of classroom teachers. These, who are directly engaged in the human function of learning and teaching, have no say in what goes on. This introduces a more sober note. Some of the product of the burst of corporate activity and technological virtuosity will be useful, some not—the pedagogical evidence is mixed and not extensive—but the brute fact is that the children are quite incidental to the massive intervention of the giant combinations.

I have chosen a wry example. But I could have chosen the leader of the American economy, the complex of cars, oil, and roads. This outgrew its proper size perhaps thirty years ago; now it is destroying both the cities and the countryside, and has been shown to be careless of even elementary safety.

Rather, let me turn abruptly to the Vietnam War. We notice the same family traits. Whatever made us embark on this adventure, by now we can define the Vietnam War as a commitment looking for a reason, or at least a rationalization. There has been no lack of policy-statements, rhetorical gestures, (it seems) manufactured incidents, and (certainly) plain lies; but as the war has dragged on and grown, all these have proved to be mere talking-points. Ringing true, however, has been the fanfare about the superb military technology that we have deployed. The theme is used as a chief morale-builder for the troops. In the absence of adequate political reasons, some have even said that the war is largely an occasion for testing new hardware and techniques. It is eerie to hear, on the
TV
, an airman enthusiastically praise the split-second scheduling of his missions to devastate rice-fields. Such appreciation of know-how is a cheerful American disposition, but it does not do much credit to him as a grown man.

Yet what emerges most strikingly from our thinking about and prosecution of the Vietnam War is, again, the input-output accounting, the systems development, and the purely incidental significance of the human beings involved. The
communiqués
are concerned mainly with the body-count of V.C. in ratio to our own losses, since there is a theory that in wars of this kind one must attain a ratio of 5 to 1 or 10 to 1. According to various estimates, it costs $50,000 to $250,000 to kill 1 Vietnamese, hopefully an enemy. Similarly, the bombing of civilians and the destruction of their livelihood occur as if no human beings were involved; they are officially spoken of as unfortunate but incidental. (The average
indemnity for a civilian death is $34.) We claim that we have no imperialist aims in Vietnam—though we are building air-bases of some very heavy concrete and steel—but evidently old-fashioned imperialism was preferable, since it tried to keep the subjugated population in existence, for taxes and labor.

At home, correspondingly, college students are deferred from the draft because they will be necessary to man the professions and scientific technology, while farm boys, Negroes, and Spanish Americans are drafted because they are otherwise good for nothing. That is to say, war is not regarded as a dread emergency, in which each one does his bit, but as part of the on-going business of society, in which fighting and dying are usual categories of the division of labor. But this is bound to be the case when 20% of the Gross National Product is spent on war (using a multiplier of 2); when more than half of the gross new investment since 1945 has been in war industry; and when much of higher education and science is devoted to war technology.

The Americans are not a warlike or bloodthirsty people, though violent. The dehumanizing of war is part of a general style of enterprise and control in which human utility and even the existence of particular human beings are simply not a paramount consideration. Great armaments manufacturers have said that they are willing and ready to convert their capital and skill to peaceful production when given the signal; this seems to mean that it is
indifferent
to them what they enterprise. Studies of American workmen have shown that they take their moral and esthetic standards not from family, church, friends, or personal interests, but from the organization and style of work at the plant; and I think that this explains the present peculiar situation that other nations of the world regard our behavior in the Vietnam War with a kind of horror, whereas Americans sincerely talk as if it were a messy job to be done as efficiently as possible.

This brings us to a broader question: What do we mean by technical efficiency in our system?

Corporate and bureaucratic societies, whether ruled by priests, mandarins, generals, or business managers, have always tended to diminish the importance of personal needs and human feeling, in the interest of abstractions and systemic necessities. And where there has been no check by strong community ties, effective democracy, or a free market, it has not been rare for the business of society to be largely without utility or common sense. Nevertheless, modern corporate societies that can wield a high technology are liable to an unique temptation: since they do not exploit common labor, they may tend to exclude the majority of human beings altogether, as useless for the needs of the system and therefore as not quite persons.

This has been the steady tendency in America. The aged are ruled out at an earlier age, the young until a later age. We have liquidated most small farmers. There is no place for the poor, e.g., more than 20 million Negroes and Latin Americans. A rapidly increasing number are certified as insane or otherwise incompetent. These groups already comprise more than a majority of the population. Some authorities say (though others deny) that with full automation most of the rest will also be useless.

There is nothing malevolent or heartless in the exclusion. The tone is not like that of the old exploitative society when people were thrown out of work during the lows of the business cycle. For humane and political reasons, even extraordinary efforts are made to shape the excluded into the dominant style, so they can belong. Even though the system is going to need only a few percent with elaborate academic training, all the young are
subjected to twelve years of schooling and 40% go to college. There is every kind of training and social service to upgrade the poor and to make the handicapped productive members of society. At high cost of effort and suffering, mentally retarded children must be taught to read, if only “cat” and “rat.”

But a frank look shows, I think, that, for most, the long schooling is a way of keeping the young on ice; the job training is busy-work; and the social services turn people into “community dependents” for generations. Much of the anxiety about the “handicapped” and the “underprivileged” is suburban squeamishness that cannot tolerate difference. What is
never
done, however, is to change the rules of the system, to re-define usefulness in terms of how people are, and to shape the dominant style to people. This cannot be done because it would be inefficient and, indeed, degrading, for there is only one right way to exist. Do it our way or else you are not quite a person.

Inevitably, such self-righteous inflexibility is self-mesmerizing and self-proving, for other methods and values are not allowed to breathe and prove themselves. Often it would be cheaper to help people to be in their own way or at least to let them be; but anything in a different or outmoded style has “deviant” or “underprivileged” written on it, and no expense is spared to root it out, in the name of efficiency. Thus, it would have been cheaper to pay the small farmers to stay put if they wished. (Anyway, I shall try to show in a subsequent lecture, it is not the case in many situations that small farming and local distribution are less efficient than the plantations and national chain-grocers that have supplanted them with the connivance of government policy.) It would be far cheaper to give money directly to the urban poor to design their own lives, rather than to try to make them shape up; it has been estimated that, in one area of poverty in New York City, the cost per family in special services is more
than $10,000 a year; and anyway, to a candid observer, the culture of poverty is not inferior to that of the middle class, if it were allowed to be decent, if it could be, in Péguy's distinction,
pauvreté
rather than
misère
. Very many of the young would get a better education and grow up usefully to themselves and society if the school-money were used for real apprenticeships, or even if they were given the school-money to follow their own interests, ambitions, and even fancies, rather than penning them for lengthening years in increasingly regimented institutions; anyway, many young people could enter many professions without most of the schooling if we changed the rules for licensing and hiring. But none of these simpler and cheaper ways would be “efficient”; the clinching proof is that they would be hard to administer.

Also,
are
the people useless? The concept of efficiency is largely, maybe mainly, systemic. It depends on the goals of the
system
, which may be too narrowly and inflexibly conceived; it depends on the ease of administration, which is considered as more important than economic or social costs; but it depends also on the method of calculating costs, which may create a false image of efficiency by ruling out “intangibles” that do not suit the method. This source of error becomes very important in advanced urban economies where the provision of personal and social services grows rapidly in proportion to hardware and food production and distribution. In providing services, whether giving information, selling, teaching children, admitting to college, assigning jobs, serving food, or advising on welfare, standardization and punch-cards may seem to fulfill the functions, but they may do so at the expense of frayed nerves, waiting in line, bad mistakes, misfitting, and cold soup. In modern conditions, the tailor-made improvisations of fallible but responsive human beings may be increasingly indispensable rather than
useless. In the jargon of Frank Riessman, there is a need for “subprofessionals.” Yet the mass-production and business-machine style, well adapted to manufacturing hardware and calculating logistics, will decide that people are useless anyway, since they can theoretically be dispensed with. It is a curious experience to hear a gentleman from the Bureau of the Budget explain the budget of the War on Poverty according to cost-benefit computation. He can demonstrate that the participation of the poor in administering a program is disadvantageous; he can show you the flow chart; he cannot understand why poor people make a fuss on this point. It is useless to explain to him that they do not trust the program (nor the director) but would like to get the money for their own purposes.