by Colin Wilson
Conclusion
The total result of a study of Galbraith, Riesman, Whyte and Packard is deeply disturbing. Moreover, their observations are relevant not for America alone; America is merely ahead of Europe in the deindividualizing process. Riesman states that the increase of other-direction is associated with “a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption,” and Galbraith and Packard show the same concern with the dangers of the “consumer fallacy.” But although some of Galbraith’s remedies point towards socialism (being an American, he takes care not to go that far), there is no reason to suppose that socialism is a panacea, as the evidence of Soviet Russia will show. The problem centers upon the deleterious effects of any organization ethic. The harsh truth would appear to be that as far as other-direction goes, there is not much to choose between Russia and the United States except that American sociologists are allowed to point out the dangers, while it is doubtful whether a Russian would have the same freedom. The fact that Whyte can evoke Orwell’s 1984 in writing of American business organizations speaks for itself. “De Tocqueville made a prophecy. If America ever destroyed its genius, it would be by intensifying the social virtues at the expense of the others, by making the individual come to regard himself as a hostage to prevailing opinion, by creating, in sum, a tyranny of the majority.” It makes no difference whether this tyranny calls itself totalitarianism or democracy.
This is not, of course, to attack the system of representative government. On the contrary, the analyses of Riesman, Whyte, and others make it plain that this is the only final defense against the development of the inner totalitarianism of big business. The need is to check the process of deindividualization, and this requires a balance of forces. There must always be an opposition. Without it, the force that predominates becomes a form of totalitarianism in the limits within which it operates. If the big-business organizations of America are preferable to the communist governments, this is only because they are not yet in a position to dominate the whole community. But the tendency increases. A recent publication, The Exploding Metropolis, by the editors of Fortune (of whom Whyte is one), considers the problem of the spreading American city almost as if the words “city” and “organization” were synonymous. Whyte complains of the process of deindividualization that is now altering the face of New York: the uniform skyscrapers and apartment buildings which are replacing the back streets, the Italian restaurants and small movie theaters, the grimy tenements and Victorian houses, and all the different atmospheres and appearances that make up a city’s individuality. Whyte is not arguing against slum clearance. He is arguing that social progress does not have to mean crushing uniformity. It is still a problem of balance.
In England we have some reason for congratulating ourselves on the amount of inner-direction that still exists. We are more socialistic than America and less than Russia; there is always an Opposition in the House of Commons. But this may only be because of the fact that Britain’s resources are smaller than those of the United States, that the drift towards the organization ethic is therefore slower, and that the drift is also opposed by a stronger tendency to tradition-direction in England. But no one can seriously deny that the tendency is there, and that it is increasing. And no one can read Riesman and Whyte—or even De Tocqueville—without feeling that what is being said has a very considerable relevance for England as well as for the United States. The danger may be ten years more advanced in America, but that hardly gives us reason for complacency.
How far, in fact, does England—or Europe, for that matter—show the same tendencies to other-direction as America? No English sociologists have published studies that compare with The Lonely Crowd or The Organization Man. But both Riesman and Whyte have shown how American culture has come to reflect the organization mentality. A comparison of the recent literature of America with that of Europe leads to some interesting observations.
1 Galbraith, of course, is not interested in this aspect of the matter. His point is only that Hamburg’s superfluous industries were destroyed, and their man power freed for war production. “In reducing… the consumption of non-essentials… the attacks on Hamburg increased Germany’s output of war material.”
2 His aim obviously has much in common with Proust’s in Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
3 Negley Farson has pointed out to me that Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith (1926) contains a remarkable anticipation of The Organization Man in its chapters describing the conflict between the idealistic scientist, Arrowsmith, and the publicity-loving head of the corporation.
4 I was so interested that I accepted his invitation, and was shown into a large tent in the rear of the building, where a Welsh clergyman with thick spectacles read the Bible to me, and then asked—with sudden penetration—if I was doing it “for a lark.” I answered, with perfect truthfulness, that I was not, regarding my scientific curiosity as wholly serious.
5 I discover a typical example in today’s Daily Express (15-12-58). A baby was about to die of a rare blood disease, and only a blood transfusion could save its life. But the parents, who were Jehovah’s Witnesses, refused to permit it, on the grounds that the Bible forbids it. The father quoted the Acts of the Apostles (XV, 28-29): “That ye abstain from meat offered to idols and from blood.” The fact that the text refers to blood-drinking was unable to shake the resolution of the parents. A Toronto judge ordered that the baby should be removed from the parents’ custody.
6 At the time of writing, I am living in Cornwall, where the opposite attitude can be plainly seen. In a recent case in which a youth murdered both his parents, and threw their bodies over a cliff, the evidence of a psychiatrist testifying to his complete instability and mental confusion—a testimony that would almost certainly have secured his release in America—had the opposite effect on a Cornish jury, who showed their contempt for it by finding him guilty of first-degree murder. It seems probable that without the psychiatrist’s testimony a verdict of “Insane” might have been returned.
7 De Sade himself recognized this as the root cause of sadism. In Les 120 Journées de Sodome, the libertine Durcet says: “One need only be mildly jaded, and all these infamies assume a richer meaning: satiety inspires them… One grows tired of the commonplace, the imagination becomes vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the weakness of our faculties, the corruption of our souls lead us to these abominations.” Vol. II, p. 16, Olympia Press edition.
Part 2. The Evidence of Literature
No poetry can bloom in the arid modern soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals. The ecstatic dream, which some 12th century monk cut into the stones of the sanctuary hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a warehouse.
BROOKS ADAMS: The Law of Civilization and Decay, 1896
How far does the study of literature—particularly of plays and novels—bear out the analyses of Riesman and Whyte? Whyte himself has glanced at this aspect of the matter in The Organization Man. The section on “The Organization Man in Fiction” is one of the shortest in the book and deals chiefly with cheap magazine fiction, but there is an interesting study of Herman Wouk’s best seller, The Caine Mutiny.
The central incident of The Caine Mutiny is the one-man mutiny of the first officer, Maryk, against the neurotic Captain Queeg. Over a period of months it has become increasingly obvious to the crew that Queeg is slightly insane, or at least unbalanced. But his neuroses, although they impose humiliation and nervous strain on the crew, do not become dangerous until the Caine runs into a storm when in convoy. Queeg loses his nerve and tries to run the ship away from the storm. Maryk knows that their only chance of not being swamped is to turn the ship and run her head on into the wind. With immense reluctance he tells Queeg that he is relieving him of his command under Article 184, “for medical reasons,” and orders the ship to be turned into the wind. Later, they pass the upturned hull of a destroyer that had apparently tried Que
eg’s running-away tactics.
Maryk is court-martialed. The defense lawyer, Greenwald, succeeds in making it obvious that Queeg is unbalanced. Maryk is acquitted, and Queeg’s career is ruined. But at this point, Wouk turns the tables. At a dinner in which the Caine officers celebrate Maryk’s acquittal, Greenwald makes a speech in which he tells Maryk that he would have preferred to defend Queeg, that Maryk was in the wrong for opposing his officer, and that the real villain of the piece was Keefer, a malcontent intellectual who had incited Maryk to rebel. I quote Whyte’s analysis: “In what must be the most irrelevant climax in contemporary fiction, Greenwald says that he is a Jew, and that his grandmother was boiled down for soap in Germany, and that thanks be to the Queegs who kept the ships going. He throws a glass of champagne at Keefer.”
Queeg represents the navy; in time of war it is the business of all officers to make the best of their commanders and keep the ships sailing. This, apparently, is the author’s view. But, as Whyte points out, the author does not go into what would have happened if Maryk had not turned the ship into the wind, and it had met the same fate as the destroyer.
Whyte wondered whether the public who made The Caine Mutiny a best seller, or who saw the film or the play based upon it, understood its fundamental argument. He set the book as the subject of a school essay. The analyses left no doubt that the main theme had been grasped. But what was astounding was the fact that fifteen out of sixteen students sided with Herman Wouk—against Maryk, for Queeg. A typical sentence from one of the essays was: “I believe that one should obey orders, no matter what the circumstances.” Whyte is obviously astonished, and speculates that twenty years ago more students would have voted for Maryk.
The same tendency can be seen in another recent bestselling novel, From Here to Eternity, by James Jones. Although the plot of the novel centers upon Prewett, an ex-boxer who refuses to enter the company boxing team and in consequence is subjected to a long course of petty indignities, there is no suggestion that Prewett is the rugged individualist who stands out against the organization—in this case, the American army. On the contrary, he loves the army. When his girl asks him why he intends to go back after a period of AWOL, he finds her anger incomprehensible:
“What did the army ever do for you besides beat you up and treat you like scum and throw you in jail like a criminal? What do you want to go back for?”
“What do I want to go back for?” Prewett said, wonderingly, “I’m a soldier.”
It is not the army that he opposes, but only the attempt to force him to box. He knows that there is nothing in army regulations that forces him to box. But he also knows that there is nothing in army regulations to stop Captain Holmes from giving him hell, and he accepts this without protest.
This is the more astonishing because a casual reader might suppose that the book was intended to be a denunciation of the army. The author makes it plain that he is aware that the army robs men of individuality. When Sergeant Warden decides to seduce Captain Holmes’s wife, Mr. Jones writes:
He still knew that he would do it, not as vengeance, or even retribution, but as an expression of himself, to regain the individuality that Holmes and the rest of them, unknowingly, had taken from him. And he understood suddenly why a man who has lived his whole life working for a corporation might commit suicide simply to express himself, would foolishly destroy himself because it was the only way to prove his own existence [my italics].
But it soon becomes apparent that the author’s attitude towards the army is as favorable as Wouk’s towards the navy (a fact that the reader might be led to suspect from the dedication of the book to the United States Army). He even seems to accept the brutality without condemnation:
There was a satisfaction that came from having borne pain that nothing else could ever quite equal, even though the pain was philosophically pointless and never affected anything but the nervous system. Physical pain made its own justification.
It is the same with the other characters. In the film of the book, Captain Holmes is cashiered for his villainies, but this would appear to be foreign to the author’s intention. In the novel, Holmes simply moves to another company in the course of promotion, and is not heard of again. Even Staff Sergeant Judson, one of the novel’s most unpleasant characters, is depicted with a detached insight that comes closely to sympathy. He had beaten a man to death in the stockade, and Prewett had vowed to kill him. As he dies, Judson expresses a kind of innocence:
“You’ve killed me. Why’d you want to kill me?” he said, and died. The expression of hurt surprise and wounded reproach and sheer inability to understand stayed on his face.
It says a great deal for Jones’s power as a writer that the reader accepts his attitude towards the army for as long as he is reading the book. Good writing can induce a suspension of the reader’s normal beliefs and sympathies. But there is a difference between accepting Jones’s views while one reads his novel and accepting them as a system of practical belief.
The Caine Mutiny and From Here to Eternity are examples in which a particular organization is the real hero. But frequently in recent American fiction, society itself, or the socially well-adjusted man, is the hero. An interesting example in this genre is By Love Possessed, by James Gould Cozzens, and its interest is heightened by the fact that its author is a New England traditionalist, who has much in common with T. S. Eliot. Its hero, Arthur Winner, is a middle-aged lawyer whose chief virtues are tolerance, kindness, shrewdness, an ability to handle people and make them trust him. The book has its positive and negative aspects. Positively, it is a careful picture of a man whom Mr. Cozzens obviously admires for possessing all the social virtues; Winner is the perfectly adjusted member of society. Negatively, it is an attack on many things that Mr. Cozzens seems to dislike: industrialism, Catholicism, foreign immigrants, jiving teen-agers and their taste in music and literature and popular entertainers. Cozzens’s Brocton seems as idyllic and “olde worlde” as Hawthorne’s Boston, and about as out of date. But what mainly emerges from the novel is Mr. Cozzens’s portrait of the well-adjusted Social Man, the man with a genius for human relationships, a sort of blueprint of what the students of Riesman’s Found Generation would all like to be at fifty-five. The only thing Winner lacks, Cozzens implies, is a little humility about his goodness, and this is supplied at the end of the novel, when he decides to condone a fraud (a situation Granville-Barker had already exploited in The Voysey Inheritance). But even this is not really an act of defying society; it is only a deepened realization that men must be tolerant of one another’s faults, and that the best way to serve society may be to conspire to deceive it. Society, in Cozzens’s view, comes first and last; By Love Possessed is an epic of humanistic thought.
This tendency to make a town or a city, rather than any particular individual, the hero of a book has become an accepted tradition in American literature since Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. In books of this kind there is usually a central character to hold the book together, but the emphasis, as their titles often imply, is upon the town. In William Faulkner, a whole county is constructed as the “hero” of a series of novels. (The title of Faulkner’s latest book is, significantly, The Town.) Although many of the novels have some sort of hero, it is obvious that Faulkner thinks of himself as a historian of an imaginary county rather than as a writer about certain trends in individual characters that interest him.
The Defeated Hero
Faulkner’s work also runs into another important area of American writing: the study of the defeated man. Faulkner implies that a heroic age has gone—the age of the Civil War, of his Colonel Sartoris and General Compson—and that a new age of petty, calculating little men (the Snopeses) is coming in. His early work is largely concerned with the defeat and disappearance of the remnants of the heroic tradition. He admires, in the modern world, minor, unheroic figures who “endure”—like Lena Grove in Light in August and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury.
There is no heroism left.
Another writer whose work overlaps many boundaries is John Dos Passos. Manhattan Transfer is an early experiment in the Beat Generation tradition. Its hero is mainly the city of New York, but at the end of the book one of its focal characters thumbs a lift and moves on, not caring where the truck takes him. But in his immense trilogy, U.S.A. (of which, as one might suppose, America is the hero), one of the few sympathetic and idealistic characters, Charley Anderson, has a slow moral disintegration and meets a violent death. In Three Soldiers, similarly, the sensitive musician, John Andrews, is finally shot for desertion. In Dos Passos, when society is not the hero (or the villain), the hero is defeated.
Modern American drama provides complete corroboration of Riesman’s theories. Its major figure, Eugene O’Neill, has written constantly of defeat. In The Hairy Ape, the central character, a powerfully built stoker who represents primeval human energy and values, finds that he is helpless when he clashes with society. As he shouts his disgust, the people walking past ignore him; when he attacks them, they walk on untouched. In the contest of individual versus society, the individual has to learn that “you can’t win.” O’Neill’s plays are full of bewildered characters driven by their passions, and the ending is nearly always despair and defeat. It is difficult to imagine anyone going further in pessimism than O’Neill does in The Iceman Cometh, which portrays a group of down-and-outs in a waterfront dive, living off illusions. The source of all this gloom seems to be the feeling, so clearly expressed in The Hairy Ape, that the individual will always be crushed and defeated by society.
The same is true of the plays of Tennessee Williams, which have been described by Professor Allan G. Halline as “true to the modern spirit of unrelieved failure or disaster.” Williams’s drama is built on two character types: shrinking, dreamy introverts and powerful force-of-nature creatures. The introverts can never come to terms with the world: this is so in all his work, from The Glass Menagerie to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But if the introverts are defeated by modern life, the force-of-nature characters do not seem to be much better off. Big Daddy, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is dying of cancer. The dynamic Pole, Kowalsky, in A Streetcar Named Desire, is tied to the life of a slum tenement and an atmosphere of futility. A bare plot analysis of the plays of Williams would give a casual reader the impression that “Williams” is one of O’Neill’s pseudonyms (except, perhaps, for Williams’s interest in homosexuality). Both playwrights deal mainly with ordinary people, violent passions, and defeat. Human beings, both writers imply, have two major enemies: their own passions and modern society. And between the two, you can’t win.