that every human being possesses an incredible potential for intellectual and personal growth and development; that every human being wants to exhaust that potential; that on the other hand, he is in a position to do so only if he lives in an environment which truly challenges him and offers him appropriate opportunities to learn and to develop.46
The effect on the work force of the microelectronic revolution in production is to be one of liberation; for “robot applications to date,” so Business Week tells us, “have relieved people of work that is hazardous, dirty, or monotonous: loading stamping presses, spraying paint in confined areas, and in making the same spot welds day in and day out.”47
But here also the traditional rhetoric is an overlay on the ironical subversion of its promises. The tendency of the productive machinery in technology is unaffected or strengthened by the supposed revolutions. It tends toward greater reliability and productivity. The apparent humanizing of the working conditions, inspired in part by Japan’s example, is gaining wider acceptance in the West entirely in response to the deteriorating reliability and productivity of the labor force. It turns out as a matter of fact that the human component of the productive process gets poorly integrated if it is treated in terms of exchangeable and mechanical parts. Hence humans are given job security and a measure of initiative and responsibility in exchange for more reliable and productive performance. One can only welcome such improvements of the working conditions. But one must also recognize that they are constrained by immovable boundaries and rest on precarious foundations. Thus two of the three nonhierarchical work arrangements, that Lauterburg considers exemplary because the workers are free to divide responsibilities and are encouraged to devise and implement innovations, are centered around highly automated production processes that go on around the clock.48 The inhuman and unalterable restraint of work at ungodly and socially harmful times does not seem to bother Lauterburg. And he seems to be unaware of the fact that the range of innovations that the workers can propose is closely hemmed in by their lack of expertise in engineering, chemistry, computer science, and so forth, by the availability of capital, by marketing considerations and other factors that are and must be centrally determined. The framework of reforms is constrained by the intricacy of the productive machinery in the widest sense, which has been built up over 200 years, is still growing in size and intricacy, and therefore needs central planning if it is not to fly apart.49 Intricacy in its microelectronic version greatly advances productivity but in turn requires the powerful insights of modern logic, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It leads to devices that are physically so dense and complex in structure that they are beyond direct intervention or modification by anyone. Thus crucial and growing parts of the technological machinery are becoming intellectually and physically ever more remote from the common person’s competence. The circle of expertise is suffering a final contraction and centralization. These aspects of technological organization cannot be changed through a rearrangement of responsibilities unless the machinery of production is disassembled, simplified, and decentralized. That would be the end of high technology as we know it. Its size and intricacy are presently beyond reform because they are entailed by the common commitment to a high and rising standard of living.
If reliability and productivity are basic to technological production, then even what limited humanization of the work place is possible remains no more secure than the consonance of humanization with the basis of production. Given a choice between a worker to whom a long-time commitment and a measure of discretion must be granted and a worker who can “work three shifts a day,” as Time has it, and who “takes no coffee breaks, does not call in sick on Mondays, does not become bored, does not take vacations or qualify for pensions,” the latter will be preferred by the goals of technological production that Business Week in this context characterizes as “improved productivity, faultless performance, and lower labor costs.”50 The latter worker, however, turns out to be a robot. The ineradicable imperfections of human labor are overcome by dispensing with human labor. The degradation of work ends with the elimination of work.
How much work will be eliminated? Some experts estimate that up to 75 percent of today’s factory work force could be displaced.51 Not only tedious, unpleasant, and harmful work will be taken over by automation but more and more skilled occupations as well, including those in the service sector whose growth Ginzberg and Vojta thought to provide the basis for the population’s increased well-being.52 What is the reaction of organized labor? The unions, Business Week tells us, “recognize that technological progress is essential.”53 And one union official is quoted as saying: “We don’t like the idea of losing jobs, but it’s part of life.”54 It is part of life in a setting where technological progress is essential, i.e., where the growing consumption of commodities is the avowed goal of society. In such a setting even organized labor sees itself primarily as a consumer and is content to speak as a consumer even when faced with the possibility of the loss of much work. The gains in the consumption of commodities justify and indeed necessitate the workers’ growing and finally total disengagement from the productive machinery.
The widespread elimination of work can come to pass in several ways. Though the productivity gains that arise from automation may maintain or raise the general affluence, those who are employed will receive a greater share of it. Employment will be a privilege, and unemployment will conform to the gradient of present poverty and powerlessness.55 Once unemployment begins to spread into the broad middle class, innovations will become necessary. They could take one of three forms: (1) The development of respectable and enjoyable forms of unemployment. (2) Making work and creating employment which are essentially idle. (3) The redistribution of available labor through the shortening of labor time per person. But a more profound and principled reform is possible also; we will consider it in Part 3.
18
Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness
The counterpart to labor is leisure. The latter constitutes the foreground and the avowed end of technology. But we are uncertain of this end and reluctant to evaluate it. How can we hope to judge technological leisure incisively and fairly? I begin the investigations of this chapter by sketching a traditional concept of excellence which still commands, I believe, wide if implicit approval. When we examine our leisure by this standard intuitively and with the aid of the social sciences, we find its value to be low. But should we not judge technology by its own rather than traditional criteria? One way of doing this is to see how people’s professed happiness is related to the progress of technology and the rise in the standard of living. It turns out that avowed happiness appears to decline as technological affluence rises.
This is a distressing and perhaps surprising result since the promise of technology can well be taken as one of happiness; and for at least two centuries we have taken incredibly massive and radical measures to fulfill the promise. But there must be something in the implementation of the technological program that is deeply flawed and unsatisfactory. This central deficiency has both troubled and eluded social theorists, as I try to show in a discussion of work by Tibor Scitovsky and Fred Hirsch. I then propose an alternative explanation which is guided by the pattern of technology. I begin by giving a fuller account of how, following the device paradigm, we have progressively divided and decomposed the fabric of our lives. This is particularly evident when we consider how technology has step by step stripped the household of substance and dignity. The resulting emptiness is to be filled with consumption, especially the consumption of those central commodities which constitute the foremost and final aspect of technology. Among them television programs have a privileged place. Seeing how television both enthralls and disappoints people, we may have here a clear view of what flaws technology at the center.
Working out the arguments in support of these points we must, to begin with, remember that it is the area of leisure and consumption where technology now must rest its
case. Few proponents of technology will deny that we have exploited and damaged the environment and that most technological labor as such fails to give the worker pride and satisfaction. But they will defend these negative aspects by pointing to the fruits of technology. These, according to the promise of technology, are of two kinds. Technological liberation has procured negative benefits; the goods and services, in other words, that have freed us from hunger, disease, illiteracy, and discomforts in general. But these benefits have been secure for many decades. Ivan Illich has in fact argued that the healing and helping agencies of technology are now doing more harm than good.1 Cancer, of course, remains to be conquered. Elsewhere, however, it is doubtful whether the advances in medical research, technology, and expenditures are yielding a reasonable advancement of health.2 Thus if we are committed to the further sophistication and expansion of the technological machinery of the industrially advanced countries, it can only be for the sake of more numerous, varied, and refined consumption goods, to be enjoyed in leisure. But it is not just that the promise of enrichment provides a continuing rationale for the promotion of technology. There is, I believe, an underlying apprehension that technology has failed so far to make our lives positively rich and that it is not a matter of continuing the enrichment through technology but of first ushering it in. The fear that the positive and shining goal of technology has after two centuries of gigantic efforts remained distant and may even slip from sight lends a note of urgency if not panic to the pronouncements of those who urge that we continue to promote technology.
This becomes apparent in the fervor with which the promise of technological enrichment is reiterated in view of the microelectronic revolution. According to James Albus of the National Bureau of Standards: “The robot revolution will free human beings from the pressures of urbanization and allow them to choose their own life-styles from a much wider variety of possibilities.” Similarly British Agriculture Minister Peter Walker: “Uniquely in history we have the circumstances in which we can create Athens without the slaves.” And finally Isaac Asimov: “Robots will leave to human beings the tasks that are intrinsically human, such as sports, entertainment, scientific research.”3 These assurances implicitly dismiss like promises that have been made for 350 years, presumably because the latter really have not been fulfilled. There is a tacit admission of failure also in the common refusal to defend the value of typical technological culture. Detailed and searching critiques of leisure and consumption have been given, of course; and they bear telling titles such as The Decline of Pleasure, The Harried Leisure Class, and The Joyless Economy.4 But the normal reaction to such indictments is not a reasoned reply to the effect that typical life in a technological society is after all one of profound pleasures, vigorous enjoyment, and refined taste. One rather tends to rise to a point of order, reminding the critics that such matters are not up for discussion in a liberal democratic society and that to insist on such discussion is to betray elitism, paternalism, arrogance, or authoritarianism. We have seen in Chapter 14 how liberal democratic theory specifically shelters technology from public examination.
The question on what grounds one can legitimately attempt to reopen a common conversation about the good life will occupy us in Part 3. A satisfactory answer will have to give an account not only of the appropriate procedure and kind of discourse but of the standards as well by which we can judge the worth of our lives. Here I will simply assume that there is in fact a sound way of approaching the problem. As regards the criteria of excellence, it is a matter not of proposals but of reminders. I believe that there still is a vaguely understood and agreed upon notion of excellence. It is embodied in the kind of life we would have liked to lead if only the world had not been mean and oppressive and we had been endowed with greater strength, more talent, and a richer education. Having failed to attain this kind of life, we often wish our children might, and we may even try to steer them toward that goal. This ideal, as suggested in Chapter 14, was in fact one of the animating forces of liberal democratic theory whose secret hope it was that under the benign conditions of liberal democracy everyone would naturally realize the ideal. Substantively speaking, we can detail this notion of excellence by turning to its roots which come from the Classical and Judeo-Christian tradition. From the former it has inherited three features: (1) The excellent person is a world citizen who understands the structure and coherence of the universe in its scientific and historical dimensions.5 (2) The excellent person is gallant as well as good and intelligent and seeks physical valor as well as intellectual refinement.6 (3) The excellent person is accomplished in music and versed in the arts.7 To the virtues of world citizenship, gallantry, and musicianship the Judeo-Christian tradition has added (4) the virtue of charity according to which real strength lies not in material force or cunning but in the power to give and to forgive, to help and to heal.8 These kinds of excellence were periodically revived and reshaped by such movements as chivalry, humanism, and the Renaissance.9
In the history of the West, the first three virtues were proper to an elite, of course. But at least since the early modern period they have had popular analogues. To world citizenship there corresponds an interest and expertise in government and politics, exercised in frequent and extended discussion and in participation wherever possible.10 Gallantry has its counterpart in bodily strength and skill which were displayed in one’s work. Musicianship found expression in singing and dancing and in telling stories. But the elevated notion of excellence is more commensurable with a technological culture than the popular. The latter was too interwoven with the fabric of pretechnological life to be separable from it and transferable to technological conditions. The excellence of high culture, on the other hand, was already set in a context of free time and leisure which is now in a partial version arising for all as the counterpart to labor. And it was, after all, the ambition of democratic technology to procure for all what used to be the privilege of the few.
We can measure the worth of typical technological leisure by the traditional standard of excellence in two complementary ways. We can ask what degree of excellence people have in fact achieved; and we can ask how much of their free time people devote to the pursuit of excellence. In correspondence to the traditional virtues, the first question divides into these more concrete queries: (1) How well educated and literate are people? How well do they understand the scientific structure of the world? How active and informed is their participation in politics? (2) What typically is the condition of people’s physical vigor and skill? (3) How well acquainted are people with the arts and how proficient are they in making music and in other artistic practices? (4) How compassionate are people privately and as citizens? How devoted are they to helping others who suffer deprivation and hardships? How conciliatory are they toward their opponents and enemies? We have already touched on fragments of answers to these questions in earlier chapters. We have noted in Chapter 4 that people’s command of science is weak. In Chapter 15 we saw that people’s participation in politics is minimal. People tolerate grave social injustice as shown in Chapter 16. These distressing indications agree with a mass of formal evidence that has become common knowledge and with our direct, personal intuitions and experiences. Functional illiteracy is spreading. Scores of national tests, measuring scholastic proficiencies, are declining. Voter turnout continues to fall. Obesity is a national problem. The television programs that critics like the least are being watched the most. Foreign aid as a share of the federal budget and the gross national product has been decreasing for a generation. The gap between the rich and poor countries and between the rich and poor within this country is widening. There is a strident tone to politics within this country and one of increasing belligerence to our foreign policy.
Some of these findings could be made more precise through reference to data gathered by the social sciences. Let me instead take up the task of quantitative confirmation by turning to the second of the complementary questions of excellence, the one whic
h asks: How much time do people typically devote to the pursuit of excellence? The time in question is of course free or leisure time, i.e., time that is not needed for sleeping, working, domestic and personal maintenance, or travel. The remaining free time, however, is not the ultimate fundament for an appraisal of the pursuit of excellence. The amount of free time is in turn based on decisions about how we want to shape our lives, and it is the progress of technology that has confronted us with the necessity to decide. When the productivity of labor rises through technological innovations, we can take the gains in the form of greater affluence or in the form of more free time; we can work less at the same level of prosperity or increase prosperity at the same level of work. The nominal workweek has decreased from roughly seventy hours in 1850 to about forty hours in 1960.11 But to this decrease we must add, according to Sebastian de Grazia, the free time gained through vacation and earlier retirement, and we must subtract the time lost through moonlighting, commuting, and work around the house, especially the increase in work around the house due to the fact that both spouses work outside the home. De Grazia finds that these factors diminish the gain of free time to eight and a half, rather than thirty, hours per week from 1850 to 1960.12 In relation to the rise in the standard of living, the decline of labor time is small. Average real family income has more than doubled from 1950 to 1973.13 Recent subsistence levels are probably 50 percent higher than the comfort level at the beginning of the century, and today’s comfort level may be three times as high as that of seventy years ago.14 And during the period of the most dramatic rise in the standard of living, i.e., since the Second World War, the length of the actual average workweek has not shrunk at all.15 From all this it is clear that we in this country, at least in our corporate roles as union members, managers, voters, and politicians, have consistently decided to enjoy the blessings of technology in the form of more commodities rather than more leisure.
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