by Peter Watson
Sontag’s warning was timely. Cage and Cunningham were in some respects the last of the modernists. In the postmodern age that followed, interpretation ran riot.
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EQUALITY, FREEDOM, AND JUSTICE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY
In the spring of 1964, just weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, delivered a speech on the campus of the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor. That day he outlined a massive program for social regeneration in America. The program, he said, would recognise the existence and the persistence of poverty and its links to the country’s enduring civil rights problem; it would acknowledge the growing concern for the environment, and it would attempt to meet the demands of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Having reassured his listeners that economic growth in America appeared sustained, with affluence a fact of life for many people, he went on to concede that Americans were not only interested in material benefit for themselves ‘but in the prospects for human fulfilment for all citizens.1 Johnson, an experienced politician, understood that Kennedy’s killing had sent a shockwave across America, had been a catalyst that made the early 1960s a defining moment in history. He realised that to meet such a moment, he needed to act with imagination and vision. The Great Society was his answer.
Whatever judgements are made about the success or otherwise of Johnson’s idea, he was right to recognise the moment, for the 1960s saw a collective shift in several areas of thought. Often characterised as a ‘frivolous’ decade of fashion frippery, musical ‘intoxication,’ sexual licence, and a narcotics-induced nihilism, the decade was in fact the time when, outside war, more people in the West than ever before faced up to – or were faced with – the most fundamental dilemmas of human existence: freedom, justice, and equality, what they meant and how they could be achieved. Before examining what Johnson did, it is necessary first to examine the context of his Michigan speech, which went back further, and ranged far wider, than the assassination of one man in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
On 17 August 1961, East German workers had begun building the Berlin Wall, a near-impregnable barrier sealing off West Berlin and preventing the escape of East Germans to the West. This followed an initiative by Nikita Khrushchev, of the USSR, to President Kennedy of the United States, that a German peace conference be held to conclude a treaty and establish Berlin as a free city, the Soviet leader proposing simultaneously that talks be held about a ban on nuclear tests. Although talks about a test ban had begun in June, they had broken down a month later. The construction of the Berlin Wall thus marked the low point of the Cold War, and provided an enduring symbol of the great divide between East and West. Relations soured still more in January of the following year, when the three-power conference (United States, U.K. and USSR) on nuclear test bans collapsed after 353 meetings. And then, in October 1962 the Cuban missile crisis flared, after Russia agreed to provide Fidel Castro – who had seized power in Cuba in 1959 after a prolonged insurrection – with arms, including missiles. President Kennedy installed a blockade around Cuba, and the world waited anxiously as Soviet ships approached the island. The crisis lasted for six days until, on 28 October, Khrushchev announced that he had ordered the withdrawal of all ‘offensive’ weapons from Cuba. It was the closest the world had come to nuclear war.
In 1961 communism stretched beyond Russia to East Germany and seven East European states, to the Balkan countries of Yugoslavia and Albania, to China, North Korea, and North Vietnam, to Angola in Africa, Cuba in the Americas, with a major Soviet or local Communist Party presence in Italy, Chile, Egypt, and Mozambique. The Soviet Union was providing arms, education, and training to several other countries, such as Syria, the Congo, and India. The world had never before been so extensively polarised into two rival systems, the centralised, state-centred and state-led Communist economies on the one hand and the free-market economies of the West on the other. Against such a background, it is perhaps no surprise that books began to appear examining the very notion of freedom at its most fundamental. Communism involved coercion, to put it mildly. But it was being successful, even if it wasn’t being popular.
One of the central tenets of Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, was that there is in life a ‘spontaneous social order,’ which has grown up over the years and generations, that things are as they are for a reason, and that attempts to interfere with this spontaneous order are almost certainly doomed to failure. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Hayek published The Constitution of Liberty, in which he extended his argument beyond planning, the focus of his earlier book, to the moral sphere.2 His starting point was that the values by which we organise and operate our lives have evolved in just the same way that our intelligence has. It follows from this, he says, that liberty – the rules of justice – ‘is bound to take priority over any specific claim to welfare’ simply because liberty and justice create that very welfare: ‘If individuals are to be free to use their own knowledge and resources to best advantage, they must do so in a context of known and predictable rules governed by law.’ Individual liberty, Hayek said, ‘is a creature of the law and does not exist outside any civil society.’ Laws, therefore, must be as universal as possible in their application, and abstract – that is, based on general, and generally accepted, concepts rather than on individual cases.3 He adds two further important points: that liberty is intimately linked to property rights, and that the concept of ‘social justice,’ which would become very much a vogue in the following years, and which certainly underpinned the Great Society, was and is a myth. For Hayek, the freedom to live as one wishes on one’s own private property, always supposing of course that one does not, in so doing, interfere with the rights of others, was the ultimate good. Being evolved, law is for Hayek ‘part of the natural history of mankind; it emerges directly from men’s dealings with each other, is coeval with society, and therefore, and crucially, antedates the emergence of the state. For these reasons it is not the creation of any governmental authority and it is certainly not the command of any sovereign.’4 Hayek was therefore against socialism, in particular the Soviet variety, on very fundamental grounds: the government – the state – organised the law, and had no second chamber, which Hayek thought was the natural antidote in the realm of law. Nor did Soviet communism allow any private property, by which the general principles of liberty translated into something practical that everyone could understand; and because it was centrally directed, there was no scope for law to evolve, to maintain the greatest liberty for the greatest number. Socialism, in short, was an interference in the natural evolution of law. Finally, and most controversially at the time, Hayek thought that the concept of ‘social justice’ was the most powerful threat to law conceived in recent years. Social justice, said Hayek, ‘attributes the character of justice or injustice to the whole pattern of social life, with all its component rewards and losses, rather than to the conduct of its component individuals, and in doing this it inverts the original and authentic sense of liberty, in which it is properly attributed only to individual actions.’5 In other words, the law must treat men anonymously in order to treat them truly equally; if they are not treated individually, serious inequities result. What is more, he argued, modern notions of ‘distributive’ justice, as he called it, involve some notion of ‘need’ or ‘merit’ as criteria for the ‘just’ distribution in society.6 He observes that ‘not all needs are commensurate with each other,’ as for example a medical need involving the relief of pain and another regarding the preservation of life when there is competition for scarce resources.7 Other needs are not satiable. It follows from this, he says, that there is ‘no rational principle available to settle the conflict’; this ‘infects’ the lives of citizens ‘with uncertainty and dependency on unforeseeable bureaucratic interventions.’8 Hayek’s view was – and remains – influential, though there were two main criticisms. One concerned spontaneous order. Why should spontaneous order occur? Why
not spontaneous disorder? How can we be sure that what has evolved is invariably the best? And isn’t spontaneous order, the fruit of evolution, a form of panglossianism, an assumption that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that we can do little to improve things?
Constitution of Liberty is primarily a work about law and justice. Economics and politics, though not absent, are in the background. In 1950 Hayek had left Britain when he was appointed professor of social and moral sciences and a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. It was a colleague in Chicago who took up where Hayek had left off, reflecting a similar view but adding an economic dimension to the debate. In Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman advanced the then relatively unpopular view that the meaning of liberalism had been changed in the twentieth century, corrupted from its original nineteenth-century meaning – of economic liberalism, a belief in free trade and free markets – and converted instead to mean a belief in equality brought about by well-meaning central government.9 His first aim was to regain for liberalism its original meaning, and his second was to argue that true freedom could only be brought about by a return to a true market economy, that real freedom could only exist when man was economically free.10 This view was more contentious then that it is now because, in 1962, Keynesian economics were still in the ascendant. In fact, Friedman’s arguments went much further than traditional economic interests in markets. Besides arguing that the depression had been brought about not by the Crash, but by economic mismanagement by the U.S. government in the wake of the Crash, Friedman argued that health, schooling, and racial discrimination could be helped by a return to free market economics. Health, he thought, was hampered by the monopoloy which physicians had over the training and licensing of fellow doctors. This had the effect, he said, of keeping down the supply of medical practitioners, which helped their earning power and acted to the disadvantage of patients. He outlined many ‘medical’ duties that could be carried out by technicians – were they allowed to exist – who could be paid much less than highly trained doctors.11 With schools, Friedman’s ideas distinguished, first, a ‘neighborhood effect’ in education. That is to say, to an extent we all benefit from the fact that all of us are educated in a certain way – in the basic skills of citizenship, without which no society can function. Friedman thought that this type of schooling should be provided centrally but that all other forms of education, and in particular vocational courses (dentistry, hairdressing, carpentry) should be paid for.12 Even basic citizenship education, he thought, should operate on a voucher system, whereby parents could exchange their vouchers for schooling for their children at the schools of their choice. He thought this would exert an influence on schools, through teachers, in that the vouchers would reward good teachers and ought to be transferred into income for them.13 Regarding racial discrimination, Friedman took the long-term view, arguing that throughout history capitalism and free markets had been the friend of minority groups, whether those groups were blacks, Jews, or Protestants in predominantly Catholic countries. He therefore thought that, given time, free markets would help emancipate America’s blacks.14 He argued that legislation for integration was no more and no less ethical than legislation for segregation.
One of the criticism of Friedman’s arguments was that they lacked the sense of urgency that was undoubtedly present in Johnson’s speech in Michigan. Kennedy’s assassination had an effect here, as did the rioting and standoffs between blacks and law-enforcement agencies that flared throughout the 1960s. There was also the relentless aggressiveness of communism in the background. But in 1964 there was another factor: the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in America, of squalor amid abundance, and its link to something that all Americans could see for themselves – the disfiguring decline of its cities, especially the inner areas. While Hayek’s and Friedman’s books, controversial as they were, were calm and reflective in tone, two very different works published at the same time were much more polemical, and as a result had an immediate impact. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, was ironic and argumentative. The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington, was downright angry.15
The Other America must count as one of the most successful polemics ever written, if judged by its ability to provoke political acts. Published in 1961, it was taken up by the New Yorker, where it was summarised under the title ‘Our Invisible Poor.’ By the end of the following year, President Kennedy was asking for specific proposals as to what might be done about poverty in the country.16 Harrington’s style was combative, but he was careful not to overstate his case. He admitted, for example, that in absolute terms poverty in the third world was probably worse than in North America. And he granted that though the affluent society helped breed ‘spiritual emptiness and alienation … yet a man would be a fool to prefer hunger to satiety, and the material gains at least open up the possibility of a rich and full existence.17 But he added that the third world had one advantage – everyone was in the same boat, and they were all pulling together to fight their way out. In America, on the other hand, there was ‘a culture of poverty,’ ‘an under-developed nation’ within the affluent society, hidden, invisible, and much more widespread than anyone had hitherto thought. He claimed that as many as 50 million people, a quarter of the nation, were poor.18 This sparked a subsidiary debate as to what the criteria should be for drawing the poverty line, and whether poverty in America was increasing, decreasing, or static. But Harrington was more concerned to show that, despite the size of the poor, middle America was blind to its plight. This was partly because poverty occurred in remote areas – among migrant workers on farms, in remote islands or pockets of the country such as the Appalachian Mountains, or in black ghettoes where the white middle classes never went.19 Here he succeeded in shocking America into realising the problem it was ignoring in its own backyard. He also argued that there was a ‘culture of poverty’ – that the lack of work, the poor housing, the ill health, high crime and divorce rates, all went together. The cause of poverty was not simply lack of money but systemic changes in the capitalist system that caused, say, the failure of the mines (as in the Appalachians) or of the farms (as in areas of California). It followed from this that the poor were not primarily to blame for their plight, and that the remedy lay not with individual action on their part but with the government. Harrington himself thought that the key lay in better housing, where the federal government should take the lead. His book was, therefore, addressed to the ‘affluent blind,’ and his searing descriptions of specific instances of the culture of poverty were deliberately designed to remove the indifference and blindness. How far he succeeded may be judged from the fact that his phrases ‘the culture of poverty’ and ‘the cycle of deprivation’ became part of the language, and in Johnson’s State of the Union address, in January 1964, four months before his Great Society speech, he announced a thirteen-point program that would wage ‘unconditional war on poverty … a domestic enemy which threatens the strength of our nation and the welfare of our people.’20
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which appeared in the same year as Harrington’s polemic, had an impact that was almost as immediate.21 Curiously, however, although many people did and do agree with her, the long-term impact of her book has not been what Jacobs hoped. Death and Life is probably the most sensible book ever written about cities. It is, first, an attack on Ebenezer Howard and his idea of garden cities (a contradiction in terms for Jacobs), on Lewis Mumford and his stages of city life (‘morbid’ and ‘biased’), and above all on Le Corbusier, whose ideas for a ‘Radiant City’ she blames for much of the great ‘Blight of Dullness’ that she saw around her.22 She began by stressing that the basic component of the city is the street, and in particular the sidewalk (pavement, in British usage). Sidewalks and streets are safer if busy, she points out; they are communities in themselves, entirely natural communities, peopled by inhabitants who know each other, as well as
by strangers. They are places where children can learn and be assimilated into adult life (she observes that ‘street’ gangs usually congregate in parks or schools). Streets stay busy, and safe, all day long if, and only if, they are home to diverse interests – i.e., they are occupied not just by offices or shops but by a mix, which includes a residential element.23 She argues that parks and schools are far more ‘fickle’ than streets – there is no telling whether a park will become a skid row or a hangout for perverts (her word), or which school will work and which won’t.24 She thinks ‘neighborhood’ is a sentimental concept but hardly a real one. Apart from streets, cities should be divided into districts, but these should be natural districts, corresponding to the way the city is divided up in the minds of most residents. The purpose of a district is political, not psychological or personal. A district is there to fight the battles that streets are too small and too weak to fight – she quotes the case of drug peddlers moving into one street. It is the district that prevails on the police to move into a street in force for a limited period until the problem is dispersed. Districts, she says, should never be more than a mile and a half from end to end.25