American Experiment (335 page)

The human use of human beings—this was the particular concern of Norbert Wiener, who published a book with this title at the start of the 1950s. A professor of mathematics at MIT and author of
Cybernetics,
which examined the dynamic role and implications of feedback in purposeful
machines and animals, Wiener shared with a wide public his fears that “thinking machines” would render the human brain obsolete, especially in an era of mammoth war technology.

But what precisely was the impact of the machine, especially automation—and what could be done about it? During the 1950s the social scientists’ diagnosis was twofold: alienation and
anomie.
Definitions of these phenomena varied widely, and hence diagnosis and prescriptions did as well. Alienation—from work, from family and community, from self? The standard answer was: all of the above. Specialization, compartmentalization, and routine left workers with little sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, or creativity on the job, and this emptiness carried over into life outside the workplace. But was the essential problem—both on the job and off it—the kind of powerlessness that Marx had analyzed, or the kind of “meaninglessness” that Karl Mannheim had seen as robbing persons of the capacity to make decisions, or the kind of normlessness that Emile Durkheim long since had analyzed in studies of
anomie,
or the sense of isolation and self-estrangement that was becoming the focus of social psychologists in the 1950s? Great disputes arose about these questions, with the social analysts themselves divided by discipline, specialization, and ideology.

The diagnosis of
anomie
aroused the sharpest concern, for it applied to a person’s whole life. Defined broadly as the collapse of social norms that regulate social attitudes, expectations, and behavior, a condition of
anomie
could have a variety of effects: a normlessness marked by the feeling that “anything goes”; a hunger for direction and authority that might lead to a turning toward autocratic leaders; a craving for reassurance from peers and superiors; a proclivity to manipulate others in a culture lacking standards of more benign human interaction; even a tendency to rely on what Robert K. Merton called mysticism—“the workings of Fortune, Chance, Luck.” But
anomie
remained a somewhat amorphous concept, overly extended, as Melvin Seeman complained, to a variety of social conditions and psychic states such as personal disorganization and cultural breakdown.

Inescapably the cardinal question arose—by what standard, what principle, what central value was the impact of technology being measured? Social observers were remarkably agreed: the test was freedom in all its dimensions and in all its equivalents such as liberty, liberation, individuality. Virtually every idea and program was advanced and defended by reference to this overriding value. “In the present situation of material and intellectual culture,” wrote Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher of the émigré Frankfurt school, “the problem of values is, in the last analysis, identical with the problem of freedom.” That one idea covered all that is “good,
right and admirable” in the world. “Freedom—and this is the profound result of Kant’s analysis—is the only ‘fact’ that ‘is’ only in its creation; it cannot be verified except by being exercised.”

Marcuse had his own very definite idea, however, as to what freedom was or should be. Freedom was liberation from an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic, oppressive technology, from the long and oppressive hours of work that drained people of their humanity, from the restrictions on human spontaneity, creativity, erotic fulfillment, and sensuous joy—restrictions of a Freudian as well as Calvinistic origin. The pursuit of happiness was the quest for freedom; indeed, freedom
was
happiness, in the fullest dimensions of both these noble concepts.

But other acolytes of Freedom saw different dimensions. They were not only like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant; each was loudly touting his part of the elephant as the whole elephant. For over two centuries Americans had debated and squabbled and even warred over the definition of freedom. During the 1950s the quarrel turned into a cacophony.

“We are children of freedom,” Dean Acheson had proclaimed. All agreed, though not all knew what he meant. During the 1950s American leaders proclaimed freedom throughout the world and for all the world. Conflict and confusion over the principles and practices of freedom did not deter the ideologues of freedom from prescribing it for all. Even before Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce, editor-in-chief of
Time
and
Life
and
Fortune,
had urged the British to follow “America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprises, America …as the Good Samaritan, really believing that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Justice and Freedom.” Though Luce had some second thoughts, at the end of the 1950s he struck the same note: “The founding purpose of the United States was to make men free, and to enable them to be free and to preach the gospel of freedom to themselves and to all men.”

Not only pundits but philosophers sounded this theme. Sidney Hook spoke for many of his fellow intellectuals when he urged on them the duty to publicize the “elementary truth” that what divided the world was “the issue of political freedom versus despotism.” Politicians long before had climbed aboard the Freedom bandwagon with alacrity. If Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms appeared a bit tattered and weather-beaten by now, many Americans remembered that his so-called “Economic Bill of Rights” had
spelled out those freedoms in a most specific way, that Truman had sought to implement them, and that even Eisenhower was paying more than lip service to them.

To celebrate Freedom was to celebrate America, and vice versa. When Luce proclaimed in 1941 the belief—shared, he said, by “most men living”—that “the 20
^th
Century must be to a significant degree an American Century,” he laid out the peculiarly American ideals and institutions that must be shared with others—“our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” The reaction was not wholly favorable. Reinhold Niebuhr found an “egotistic corruption” in the very title, a critic dubbed Luce the Cecil Rhodes of journalism, and Henry Wallace countered Luce with a proclamation of the century of the common man. Was this the new American imperialism? Luce later talked less about the American Century but still pushed the doctrine.

Embarrassments occasionally marred this glowing portrait of Freedom versus Autocracy. Leading American intellectuals became furious over “party liners’ control” of a 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Sidney Hook himself had been denied the rostrum to offer a paper disputing the Marxist doctrine of “class truth.” In reply such European and American luminaries as André Malraux, John Dos Passos, Ignazio Silone, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Koestler, and Hook met in Berlin in June 1950 to inaugurate the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Supporting messages arrived from Eleanor Roosevelt and Niebuhr. After properly flaying totalitarian thought control, a number of participants proclaimed that the West must take its stand on communism—it was “either-or.” Condemning those who preferred “neither-nor,” the Congress set up a nucleus of internationally known writers who would have no truck with “neutrality” in the struggle for freedom. It would later develop that the activities of the Congress in the 1950s and 1960s were subsidized in part by the CIA, which disbursed funds through fake foundations.

Still, the American intellectuals did not need Washington gold to stiffen their resolve. Their views sprang from the very core of their belief in individual liberty and human rights. And they gained immeasurably both in their self-confidence and in their influence from their conviction that while the other side was ideological, their own position was not. They contended that after the passions of the New Deal era, the struggle with Hitlerism, and the polemics of the cold war, Americans were spurning ideology as the “opium of the intellectuals,” in Raymond Aron’s words, or coming to the “end of ideology,” in Daniel Bell’s. “Looking back from the
standpoint of a newly-achieved moderation,” wrote sociologist Edward Shils, “Western intellectuals view the ideological politics of Asia and Africa, and particularly nationalism and tribalism, as a sort of measles which afflicts a people in its childhood, but to which adults are practically immune.”

Picturing ideology as a form of childhood measles was a curious indulgence on the part of intellectuals who themselves were acting as ideologists by any neutral definition of the term. If an ideology consists of a comprehensive set of goals or values, reflecting the mobilized attitudes of a large section of the public, expressed through institutions such as the press and the state, and legitimized by appropriate political, economic, and other establishments, then postwar Americans indeed possessed an ideology that was brilliantly expressed by its pundits and philosophers. It was an ideology of hazy, undefined ends and richly differentiated means—moderate and incremental policy-making machinery, a politics of bargaining and accommodation, a polity rich in voluntary associations and pluralistic groupings, all leading to a mixed economy and a stable, balanced, consensual society.

Ultimately this kind of society reflected a political ideology of consensus and compromise. Men of ideas such as Hook, Bell, Schlesinger, and Daniel Boorstin often differed on specific issues and reforms, but they struck historian Richard Pells as tending “to elevate existing American customs and institutions to a set of normative ideals.” If they were more interested in analyzing society than in reforming it, however, their “retreat from ideology” did allow them to focus on current economic and political realities, Pells granted. “At the same time, their high regard for pragmatism and stability, together with their dread of fanaticism and upheaval, were reasonable and humane reactions to the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.”

It was not that the social critics had wholly deserted their old vocation of judging their own culture. Even though their ideas had reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment—but without passion, as Shils suggested—those ideas continued to arouse disputes within the still compelling trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Amid the relative affluence of the 1950s critics now appeared less troubled by the lack of real equality of opportunity for the less privileged, far more concerned about the meaning of freedom for the middle classes and the threat to that freedom from solidarity of a smothering suburban kind. Most of the critics deplored the vast disparities in income and welfare among Americans—who could
not?—but many of them now focused on psychological and cultural trends within the middle class rather than economic and social deprivations within the working class and the poor. Even the anxiety over automation amounted to a worry over psychological deprivation rather than over bread-and-butter issues of take-home pay.

And looking out over the social and physical landscape surrounding the cities, critics felt they had plenty to worry about. Huge eight-lane highways were grinding their way through the working-class sectors into the greener areas beyond, bringing in their wake concrete cloverleafs, shopping malls, towering apartment houses, and—much further out—suburban ranch houses complete with swimming pools, manicured greens, picture windows, and outdoor barbecue pits. These were the baronies of the new middle classes, “from the managerial employees and the ‘idea men’ in the talent professions at the top,” Max Lerner wrote, “to the file clerks and sales girls at the bottom: a formless cluster of groups, torn from the land and from productive property, with nothing to sell except their skills, their personality, their eagerness to be secure, their subservience and silence.”

The new middle classes, bursting with achievers and achievers-to-be, with postwar “baby-boomers,” with creative skills, with ladders of upward mobility, were the source of enormous energy and talent in the America of the 1950s, and a source too of social and political equilibrium. But critics, even aside from the intellectual disdain for picture windows and barbecue pits, worried about more than dreary suburbs and empty lives. They fretted over psyches. A central fear carried over from earlier work by Erich Fromm, a German philosopher and psychoanalyst who had emigrated to the United States after Hitler’s seizure of power. In 1941 Fromm published
Escape from Freedom,
which held that, upon the lifting of feudal ties and hierarchy, Protestantism had produced fearful and alienated persons, that industrialization had forced on such persons competitive, insecure lives that left them fearful of economic crises, loss of jobs, and imperialistic wars, and that the outcome was a tendency to submit to authoritarian leaders who offered them feelings of involvement, security, and power. This was the road to fascism. While Fromm feared these tendencies in all strata, he and his followers saw the middle classes—especially the lower middle classes—as most vulnerable to the appeal of fascism.

Other social critics eschewed such apocalyptic visions but they had major concerns of their own. In 1950 David Riesman, a University of Chicago social theorist still in his thirties, gained almost instant attention with
The Lonely Crowd,
a study of the “other-directed” personality that had replaced the “inner-directed” product of the Protestant ethic, which earlier had superseded the “tradition-directed” member of a hierarchical society held
in the family embrace of clan, caste, and castle. In the affluent, leisure-minded postwar era, Riesman’s other-directed man, anti-individualistic, group-centered, and conformist, put social solidarity and harmony over his own individuality and was ready to market his personality rather than his skill or creativity.
The Lonely Crowd
was studded with memorable phrases and insights: the oversteered child—from Bringing Up Children to Bringing Up Father—from craft skill to manipulative skill—from the bank account to the expense account—heavy harmony and lonely success— the automat versus the glad hand—captains of industry and captains of consumption.