But there is still a substantial amount of free time, on the average roughly four hours per weekday, six hours on Saturdays, and eight hours on Sundays.16 How much of this time is spent in the pursuit of excellence? The categories of social research reflect the four traditional virtues but weakly. Activities such as reading the newspaper or engaging in conversations can advance one’s world citizenship, but they may also be done merely for diversion. Some of the categories, however, are more central to the traditional kinds of excellence and may provide benchmarks. World citizenship surely benefits from attending programs in political or union training to which on the average less than a minute per day is devoted. (The same measure of spending time is used in what follows.) Less than half a minute is spent on attending special lectures, less than a minute on scientific reading, and about five minutes on reading books (of whatever sort). Gallantry is served through active sports, which take up six minutes, and through outdoor activities, such as hiking, on which two minutes are spent. Musicianship is most directly making music to which one minute is given. Artwork takes less than half a minute, as do visits to museums. Half a minute is devoted to theater performances and concerts. Records are played for one minute. An indication of charity is volunteer work on which between one and two minutes are spent.17 These are of course rough, global, and partial measures, global since they are not differentiated by sex, age, or education, and partial since they reflect the responses of a particular sample at a particular time. But they conform so well to other studies and findings and to our own considered experiences that their import is unmistakable.18 However much we as a society may admire excellence, we are certainly not devoted to its pursuit. All the activities which have been taken as suggesting a dedication to excellence constitute when taken together less than a quarter of the time spent on watching television.19
To these distressing findings one might make two replies. The first says that the citizens of the technological society are certainly no more indolent and ignorant than those of pretechnological times. But to say this is to eviscerate the promise of technology. Champions of technology take great pride in the radical novelty and power of technology. Bertrand de Jouvenel’s remarks are typical.
We live in an Age of Opportunity. Our modern civilization is far superior to any other in terms of power, and thereby we enjoy undreamed of possibilities to foster the good life not for a tiny minority, as in earlier societies, but for the multitude. This is a wonderful privilege; nonsensical therefore is the attitude of those who regret not having lived at some former epoch: no matter that their personal circumstances might have been better, their means of improving the circumstances of their fellowmen would have been slighter. It is right to rejoice in the greatness of these means: it is proper to feel responsible for their personal and optional [optimal?] use.20
It is obvious that this glorying in technology is restricted to the machinery of technology, to “Technology as a Means” according to the title of de Jouvenel’s essay. The ends are left open but are assumed to be grand. The essay ends with the suggestion that the processes of technological innovation are “to procure a life rich in amenities and conducive to the flowering of human personalities.”21 Though the technological means-ends structure is radically novel, it retains the traditional subservience of the means to the ends; and that subordination is in fact sharper and more extreme in technology than in the tradition. Hence to disavow ambition regarding the ends, i.e., leisure, is to compromise the greatness of the means, i.e., of the technological machinery; more, it is to put into doubt the sense of the gigantic technological enterprise where it goes beyond its strictly liberating functions.
Another reply to the bleak picture of leisure that we have seen is to reject the traditional standards of excellence as inappropriate to a technological culture. They were, one might say, useful as traditional signposts, but eventually technological culture must be allowed to take its own course. It was useful at first to speak of automobiles in the customary framework as horseless carriages. But in due course we have come to recognize cars as novel devices in their own right. The force of this reply lies in the insight that technology has in fact a character of its own that calls for a commensurate analysis. This I have attempted to provide in terms of the device paradigm, and the salient part for an appraisal of leisure is the commodity whose mode of presence is availability which in turn has the aspects of instantaneity, ubiquity, safety, and ease. Technology succeeds on its own terms when a greater number and variety of commodities become available and when availability is more and more refined. Success of this sort is surely and abundantly evident. But it is achieved very nearly by definition rather than by measurement against an agreed upon standard. Technology could of course and may in the future fail to meet increasingly its goal of procuring commodities. But precisely if it succeeds, there is a legitimate question whether the procurement and consumption of commodities provide happiness. It is helpful to frame the question this way because it appeals to a standard which in regard to technology is well positioned between independence and affinity. It is one to which technology has submitted from the start. The promise of technology was really one of happiness though that was not always explicit.22 But it has been close to the surface throughout as it is today in advertisement, the characteristic rhetoric of technology.23 Happiness, though prominent in the pursuits of this country, is of course an ambiguous term.24 One sense that had much currency in the early years of the nation was that of pastoral contentment. Jefferson was its great proponent. But he failed to see how technology began to undermine and disrupt the rural basis of such happiness and to transform the notion of happiness itself.25 How radical and successful that transformation has been is difficult to establish. It is a straightforward enterprise, on the other hand, to find out how happy the citizen of the technological society typically professes to be, and one can relate these findings to the progress of technology and to less technological settings. One finds that during the twenty-five years after the Second World War, while the standard of living more than doubled, professed happiness declined rather steadily and significantly, and one finds that people in the technologically advanced countries are no happier than those in less-developed ones.26 This shows clearly that in technological societies happiness is not simply thought to be higher consumption. But the research also shows, as was seen from a different angle in Chapter 15, that people are not willing to let go of advanced technology. What kind of happiness does technology procure then? And why do people remain both enthralled and unsatisfied by it?
To answer, one must act on the suspicion that there is something in the character of technological goods that accounts for the divided and unhappy reaction of consumers. But that something is difficult to grasp and typically ignored by social scientists. Tibor Scitovsky’s book on The Joyless Economy is instructive both for its determination to shed light on consumer dissatisfaction and in illustrating the danger of being deflected from the crucial difficulty. The implicit but definite background against which Scitovsky outlines the failings of technological culture is a life of traditional excellence that he finds more nearly exemplified in Europe than in the United States. Scitovsky’s account is rich in illuminating observations. But he does not trust his judgment and taste enough to let them speak for themselves. He feels the need for cogent guidance to gain entry into the realm of cultural criticism, and he believes to have found this guide in behavioral psychology. The crucial doctrine he adopts from this discipline is the point that pleasure and comfort are incompatible in the following sense.27 Comfort is the feeling of well-being that derives from an optimally high and steady level of arousal of positive stimulation whereas pleasure arises from an upward change of the arousal level. Since there is a best or highest level of pleasure that constitutes comfort, one cannot indefinitely obtain pleasure by rising from comfort to more comfort. When the optimal level of arousal and stimulation is surpassed, the result is pain and discomfort. Hence pleasure can only be had at
the price of discomfort. Scitovsky finds that American technological culture favors comfort; and that accounts for the dullness and shoddiness of our leisure possessions and practices. The tendency toward comfort, in turn, Scitovsky traces to our Puritan heritage, to our disdain of pleasure and our preference of work over play and of production over consumption.28
He finds no fault with the technological machinery as such and accepts the typical technological means of leisure but thinks they should be put to better ends. “The objection, therefore,” he says, “to unskilled and effortless pastimes such as television, driving, and shopping is not that the stimulus they provide is inherently inferior, which it is not, but that it is limited in quantity and so provides only a limited quantity of enjoyment.”29 The quantity of stimulation and enjoyment can be increased if more variety and novelty are given to the content whatever its form or channel.30 Scitovsky often urges engagement, education, and skill as necessary for genuine pleasure, a view that is consistent with his commitment to traditional excellence.31 But these urgings are irrelevant and outdated if pleasure is thought to be sufficiently defined as a rise in the arousal level stemming from varying and novel stimulation. The problem is that behavioral psychology generally, and Scitovsky in particular, have modeled the stimulus-response relation on the device paradigm where the stimulus and its channel are mere means, to be judged only by their capacity for transmitting novelty and, in a world of scarcity, by their cost efficiency.32 By these standards there can be no objection to the attenuation of things to mere commodities which has its extreme conclusion in drugs or direct stimulation of the brain. This, surely, is the most cost-effective stimulation, and it seems merely a matter of technical ingenuity to procure abundant variety and novelty. But when commodities have reached the final stage of reduction and refinement, leisure outwardly will no longer be distinguishable from sleep or unconsciousness. A person devoted to such leisure could hardly be more different from the person of that traditional excellence that Scitovsky rightly cherishes.
An alternative critique of technological goods is provided by Fred Hirsch. Many of his substantive points are touched upon by Scitovsky also. Hirsch, however, does not resort to an alien discipline to ground his argument but centers his critique in economic analysis itself, albeit in the philosophically sensitive and historically circumspect style of the great economic pioneers. To train Hirsch’s insights on the problem at hand, one may call his critique a “types-of-goods-analysis.” There are three sorts of goods that people desire or need for their well-being. (1) Commercial goods are the standard goods and services that can be produced by private firms, priced, purchased individually, and measured in the aggregate by the gross national product (GNP). (2) Positional goods owe their value to a high rank in a hierarchy, not to their intrinsic or absolute properties. A Ph.D. is now a positional good in the hierarchy of education and credentials, but it would cease to be that if half of all high school graduates were to obtain Ph.D.’s. (3) Public and social goods can only be owned in common and must be acquired and maintained at public expense or cannot be bought at all. Examples are clean air, open spaces, civility, and mutual trust. Hirsch argues that the technologically advanced economies excel at producing commercial goods but are unable to provide the others and, worse, imperil and erode those goods. The general rise in productivity and affluence allows people to buy more and more goods, among them goods that at first are valued as positional but cease to be positional when large numbers of people possess them. Not only did cars and single family homes lose their glamour when they had become common; the spread of these goods has led to definite harms and inconveniences such as crowding, pollution, waste of energy, loss of public transportation and open space. Not only are people frustrated in their pursuit of positional goods; they end up in a worse position than they occupied when they set out on their pursuit. As regards public and social goods, the private corporations that dominate the economy are unable to provide them and therefore transform them into commodities and so draw them into the realm of commercial production. Public playgrounds are replaced by private sports facilities; condominiums with private guards are substituted for secure communities. Hirsch contends that the detrimental effects of commercialization and of commodity fetishism (as he defines it) have until recently been checked by an unacknowledged but powerful social morality which held capitalists and workers to standards of truth, trust, acceptance, restraint, and obligation.33 This moral legacy is now being depleted, and, unless we learn to restore it, we have hard times ahead of us.
Apart from the conclusion, Hirsch’s arguments seem to be well-founded and trenchant to me. They are much richer in their connections and implications than can appear from the sketch above. And yet the analysis remains limited and, due to that limitation, makes technological production and consumption appear too precarious. The analysis thus overstates the need for reform that arises from within technology and in that sense exaggerates the reform potential that is intrinsic to technology. This last point will be taken up in Part 3. Here I am concerned to enlarge Hirsch’s critique of technological consumption and leisure.
The question is how well Hirsch’s types-of-goods analysis explains the failure of general happiness to rise with the standard of living. Hirsch takes up the question explicitly and points out that people who rank high on the income scale profess to be happier than those lower on the scale.34 Happiness, then, is a positional good or the consequence of positional goods and in either case cannot be increased through a general rise of the standard of living. Lifting a ladder does not change the relations of the rungs. But not only does an increase in the GNP, so Hirsch argues further, conceal the inevitable constancy of rank happiness; it also overstates the value of the absolute gains that everyone obtains at his or her level. The futile mass competition for positional goods leads to commodities that provide no net gain but simply serve to offset negative effects of that competition. Thus when millions buy single family homes, private residences become so distant from social institutions that two cars and expensive and extensive driving become necessary. The affluence of a spacious house and lot and of two cars, then, provides no better life than a more modest dwelling close to downtown. We must therefore distinguish, as regards commodities or commercial goods, between final consumption goods and defensive goods or regrettable necessities. The GNP counts all commercial goods indifferently.35
It is surely true that the frustration in positional competition and the negative side effects of that competition lead to unhappiness. But how deep is the dissatisfaction? Is it deep enough to bring into doubt the very soundness of commodity production and consumption? Is it a source of fundamental instability as the tenor of Hirsch’s book suggests? Dissatisfaction, if properly channeled, can promote growth and stability. And that seems to be the case in modern technology. To see this we must first realize that rank happiness and rank dissatisfaction presuppose a social homogeneity that sets technological societies apart from their late medieval and early modern predecessors.36 There was no way in which a medieval peasant could have become a bishop or duke. But common people today can become millionaires if they are lucky in the lottery or invent a simple, efficient, and patentable spray nozzle. People in the lower reaches of a technological society are not opposed to those above them; they do not find what the privileged have and do alien or detestable. Poor and rich are largely members of the same culture; it is just that the poor desire a more extensive and expensive version of their present state. As the janitor who won in the lottery said: “I have eaten bread all my life; now I want cake.” This accounts for the common upward orientation which, as suggested in Chapter 16, is a stabilizing factor in Western technological societies. The goal of upward orientation is of course the highest standard of living, the consumption of the most numerous, varied, and refined commodities; and the exclusion of skill and training from consumption makes the rise to a high station possible and easy as regards obligations. It is not quite so simple, of course. There
are still niceties of taste and tradition and friction, so we hear, between new and old money. But hired expertise can deal with most of these problems.
Still, dissatisfaction will remain productive only if it bears some fruit for those who are dissatisfied. In the Western democracies, the fruits of technology are reaped by the broad middle class in the arrangement of diachronic equality which was outlined in Chapter 14. Those lower on the ladder of affluence will have tomorrow what those above them have today. A stagnant or receding economy is of course fatal to that arrangement. Such a fatality can result when technology runs up against physical limits to growth. But here, as generally, Hirsch believes that the social limits, though more concealed as yet, are really more forbidding. Even if production procures for the middle class tomorrow everything that the rich have today, it would not be the same for the middle class. Not only has the novelty worn off when a commodity reaches the lower ranks; some luxurious commodities such as cars have become necessities on arrival among middle- and lower-income families, and the sheer numbers needed to furnish the lower ranks with a commodity lead to congestion and pollution.37 These are certainly serious impediments to diachronic equality. But technology has mitigating tendencies as well. The transformation of things into devices and the progress of devices exhibits a shrinking of the machinery and an attenuation of commodities so that demands on space and resources diminish. This tendency is clearest in the development of electronics which now is at the leading edge of technological progress. In this area also the introduction and production of devices and commodities require a mass market so that broader segments of the population have the benefit of newly minted devices. To be sure the spatially and physically massive procurement of commodities that one sees in second homes, recreational vehicles, and tourism will have to be slowed due to physical and social limits. But there is much waste in past practices that can now be mined. One must also remember that congestion is not always avoided and thought to be an evil.38 Especially in leisure, people often seek congestion. Sheer numbers of people seem to create an impression of importance and excitement.
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