Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  PART FOUR

  THE COUNTER-CULTURE TO KOSOVO

  The View from Nowhere, The View from Everywhere

  33

  A NEW SENSIBILITY

  On Saturday, 6 October 1973, on the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a surprise attack on Israel was launched from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south. For forty-eight hours the very existence of Israel appeared threatened. Its ‘Bar-Lev’ line in Sinai was broken, and many of its military aircraft were destroyed on the ground by Arab missiles. Only the rapid response of the United States, sending more than $2 billion worth of arms inside two days, enabled Israel eventually to recoup its losses and then hit back and gain ground. When a ceasefire was declared on 24 October, Israeli forces were close enough to Damascus to shell it, and had a bridgehead on the Western bank of the Suez Canal.

  But the Yom Kippur War, as it came to be called, was more than just a war. It was a catalyst that led directly and immediately to an event that Henry Kissinger, at the time the U.S. secretary of state, called ‘one of the pivotal events in the history of this century.’ In the very middle of the war, on 16 October, the Arab and several non-Arab oil-producing nations cut oil production, and raised prices 70 percent. Two days before Christmas, they raised them again, this time by 128 percent. Crude oil prices thus quadrupled in less than a year.1 No country was immune from this ‘oil crisis.’ Many poorer countries of Africa and Asia were devastated. In the West, petrol rationing was introduced in places like Holland for a while, and lines at gas stations became familiar everywhere. And it introduced a phenomenon not anticipated by Keynes – stagflation. Before the Yom Kippur War the average rate of growth in the developed West was 5.2 percent, comfortably ahead of the average rate of price increases of 4.1 percent. After the oil shock, growth was reduced to zero or even minus, but inflation rose to 10 or 12 percent.2

  The oil crisis, in historian Paul Johnson’s words, was ‘by far the most destructive economic event since 1945.’ But the oil-producing nations’ decision to raise prices and limit production were not only the result of the war or the fact that – in the end – they were defeated and lost territory as a result of America coming to Israel’s aid. The world’s economic structure was changing anyway, if less obviously. Ironically, the year of rebellion, 1968, when black and student violence had peaked in America, was also the time of the United States’ greatest economic influence. In that year, American production was more than a third of the world total – 34 percent. But, like many success stories, this one hid within it incipient problems. Ever since 1949 the Communist Chinese had been worried that America might, in crisis, block any dollars they earned. They had therefore always kept their dollars in Paris. Over the years others had followed suit, and a market in ‘Eurodollars’ had grown up. In turn this spawned a Eurocredit and Eurobond market beyond the control of Washington, or anybody, helping to make money more volatile than it had ever been. Alongside this were two additional factors. One was the ecological sentiment that the earth was a finite resource, which translated into a steady rise in commodity prices. Second was a specific instance of this: from 1970, America’s own oil production peaked and then began to decline. In 1960 she had imported 10 percent of her oil; by 1973 that figure was 36 percent.3 A major shift was taking place in the very nature of developed societies. It had been gathering pace, and visibility, throughout the 1960s, but it took a war to bring it home to everyone.

  One of the first to reflect on this change, in his usual elegant way, was the economist J. K. Galbraith. In 1967 he released The New Industrial State, in which he described a new business-economic order that, he maintained, drastically changed the nature of traditional capitalism. His starting point was that the nature of the large business enterprise had altered fundamentally by the 1960s as compared with the start of the century.4 Whereas the likes of Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, and Guggenheim had been entrepreneurs, taking huge risks to launch the companies that bore their names, by the time these companies had matured, they had changed character in two fundamental ways. In the first place, they were no longer run by one man, who was both a leader and a shareholder, but by managers – Galbraith actually called them the technostructure, for reasons that will become apparent – who owned a minority of shares. One important result of this, says Galbraith, is that the shareholders nowadays have only nominal control over the company that, in theory, they own, and this has significant psychological consequences for democracy. Second, mature companies, mass-producing expensive and complex products, in fact have very little interest in risk or competition. On the contrary they require political and economic stability so that demand, and the growth in demand, can (within certain limits) be predicted. The most important effect of this, Galbraith argued, is that mature corporations actually prefer planning in an economy. In traditional conservatism, planning smacks of socialism, Marxism, and worse, but in the modern world mature corporations, who operate in an oligopolistic situation, which to Galbraith is but a modified monopoly, cannot do without it.5

  Everything else in the new industrial state, says Galbraith, stems from these two facts. Demand is regulated, as Keynes showed, partly by the fiscal policy of governments – which presupposes a symbiotic relationship between the state and the corporation – and by devices such as advertising (which, Galbraith believes, has had an incalculably ‘dire’ effect on the truthfulness of modern society, to the point where we no longer notice how routinely dishonest we are). An additional characteristic of modern industrial society, Galbraith says, is that more and more important decisions depend on information possessed by more than one individual. Technology has a great deal to do with this. One consequence is a new kind of specialism: people who have no special skills in the traditional sense but instead have a new skill – knowing how to evaluate information. Thus information becomes important in itself, and people who can handle information constitute an ‘insider class,’ the managers or technostructure, alongside an ‘outsider class,’ the shareholders.6 Galbraith clearly thought this distinction was more important than, in practice, it turned out to be (though for a while, in the 1980s, ‘insider trading’ was a scandal that contaminated business life on both sides of the Atlantic). One effect of all this, he said, was to change the business experience. Instead of being rugged, individualistic, competitive, and risk-taking, executive life became highly secure; when Galbraith wrote his book, recent studies had shown that in America three-quarters of executives surveyed had been with their company more than twenty years. Affluence plays a part, says Galbraith, because the further a man is from the breadline – the more affluent he is – the more his desires may be manipulated, and the bigger the role of advertising, and here it was fortunate that the rise of radio and then television coincided with the maturation of corporations and the rise of affluence.7

  But Galbraith’s aim was not simply to describe the new arrangement, important though that was. With an appropriate sense of mischief, he observed how the technostructure, the management of the mature corporations, presents itself. Far from telling the truth about the new state of play, where in fact the corporations rule the roost, the technostructure pays lip service to the idea that the ‘consumer is king.’ The real truth, that the corporation has pretty near total control over prices and a good grasp on the control of demand, goes by the board.8 Galbraith’s next point was that the nature of unemployment was changing – indeed, in a sense, it was starting to lose any meaning; ‘More and more, the figures on unemployment enumerate those who are currently unemployable by the industrial system.’9 This has a domino effect among the unions, who lose power, and the educational and scientific ‘estates,’ which gain it. Galbraith was undoubtedly correct in his analysis of the relative powers of the unions, the education services, and the scientists; where he was wrong was that he expected the latter two estates to acquire a political force, as the unions had been hitherto. This didn’t happen. He also thought that scientists w
orking for private companies would become a voice in society. That didn’t happen either.

  After a swipe at the defence industry, examining how the Cold War actually helped economies in a Keynesian sense (though traditional conservatives denied it), Galbraith suddenly changed tack completely and considered what he called the ‘aesthetic experience.’ The world of artists, he says, is quite unlike that of the technostructure: ‘Artists do not come in teams.’ Athens, Venice, Agra, and Samarkand are quite unlike Nagoya, Düsseldorf, Dagenham, or Detroit and always will be. He saw it as the role of artists to attack and criticise the technostructure; there is, he says, an inevitable struggle: ‘Aesthetic achievement is beyond the reach of the industrial system and, in substantial measure, in conflict with it. There would be little need to stress the conflict were it not part of the litany of the industrial system that none exists.’10 Galbraith felt that aesthetic goals would ultimately prevail over industrial ones.

  But the main argument of The New Industrial State was that traditional capitalism had changed out of all recognition and that traditional capitalists lied about that change, pretending it just hadn’t happened. At the time his book went to press, Galbraith said, Boeing ‘sells 65 percent of its output to the government; General Dynamics sells a like percentage; Raytheon … sells 70 percent; Lockheed … sells 81 percent; and Republican Aviation … sells 100 percent.’11 ‘The future of the industrial system is not discussed partly because of the power it exercises over belief. It has succeeded, tacitly, in excluding the notion that it is a transitory, which would be to say that it is a somehow imperfect, phenomenon…. Among the least enchanting words in the business lexicon are planning, government control, state support and socialism. To consider the likelihood of these in the future would be to bring home the appalling extent to which they are already a fact. And it would not be ignored that these grievous things have arrived, at a minimum with the acquiescence and, at a maximum, on the demand, of the system itself.’ And finally: ‘There is no natural presumption in favour of the market; given the growth of the industrial system the presumption is, if anything, the reverse. And to rely on the market where planning is required is to invite a nasty mess.12 Galbraith’s was a spirited attack, making some uncomfortable points about the way capitalism had developed, and presented itself. He foresaw the increased role of science, the overwhelming importance of information and the changing nature of unemployment and the skills that would be needed in the future.

  What Galbraith missed, Daniel Bell brought centre stage. In his study of Bell, Malcolm Waters describes how in 1973 both men featured in a list compiled by the sociologist Charles Kadushin, who had carried out a survey to discover which individuals were regarded as America’s intellectual elite. Among the top ten were Noam Chomsky, J. K. Galbraith himself, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, with Hannah Arendt and David Riesman further down, and W. H. Auden and Marshall McLuhan even lower. There was just one sociologist in the top ten: Daniel Bell.

  Bell’s End of Ideology was covered in chapter 25, on the new psychology of affluence. In 1975 and again a year later, he came up with two more ‘big ideas.’ The first was summed up in the title of his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. For Bell, life is divided into three ‘realms’ – nature, technology, and society – that determine the basics of experience. History is also divided into three. Pre-industrial society may be seen as ‘a game against nature,’ the attempt to extract resources from the natural environment, where the main activities are hunting, foraging, farming, fishing, mining, and forestry.13 Industrial society is ‘a game against fabricated nature,’ centring on human—machine relationships, and with economic activity focusing on the ‘manufacturing and processing of tangible goods,’ the central occupations being the semiskilled factory worker and engineer.14 A post-industrial society is a ‘game between persons,’ ‘in which an “intellectual technology,” based on information, rises alongside machine technology.’15 Post-industrial society centres around industries from three sectors – transportation and utilities; finance and capital exchange; health, education, research, public administration, and leisure. Among all these, says Bell, scientists ‘are at the core’: ‘Given that the generation of information is the key problem and that science is the most important source of information, the organisation of the institutions of science, the universities and research institutes is the central problem in the post-industrial society. The strength of nations is given in their scientific capacity.’16 As a result the character of work has changed, focusing now on relationships between people rather than between people and objects; ‘the expansion of the service sector provides a basis for the economic independence of women that was not previously available’; the post-industrial society is meritocratic; there is a change in scarcity – ‘scarcity of goods disappears in favour of scarcity of information and time.’ Finally Bell identifies something he labels a situs, a ‘vertical order of society as opposed to a horizontal one,’ such as classes. Bell identifies four functional situses (scientific, technological, administrative, and cultural) and five institutional ones (business, government, university/research, social welfare, and military), a division that would be eerily paralleled in the organisation of e-mail (see chapter 42). Besides the situses, however, Bell identifies a ‘knowledge class’ (of, mainly, scientists). He points out, for example, that whereas only about a quarter of first degrees in the United States are in science, more than half the doctorates are in natural science and mathematics.17 This knowledge class is crucial to the success of the postindustrial society, but Bell remained uncertain as to whether it would ever act as a class in the Marxist sense, because it would probably never have enough independence to undermine capitalism.*

  A further factor of significance, Bell says, is that intellectual property is owned not individually but communally. This means that politics become more, and not less, important, because the planning, which maximises scientific output, requires national rather than regional or local organisation. ‘Politics therefore becomes the “cockpit” of the post-industrial society, the visible hand that coordinates where the market can no longer be effective.’18

  Bell’s third ‘big idea,’ published a year later, in 1976, was The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This too had three themes bound together by the thesis that contemporary society is dominated by irreconcilable contradictions. These were: (I) the tension between the asceticism of capitalism (as defined by Max Weber) and the acquisitiveness of later forms of capitalism; (2) the tensions between bourgeois society and modernism – modernism, through the avantgarde, was always attacking bourgeois society (the rejection of the past, the commitment to ceaseless change, and the idea that nothing is sacred); and (3) the separation of law from morality, ‘especially since the market has become the arbiter of all economic and even social relations (as in corporate obligations to employees) and the priority of the legal rights of ownership and property over all other claims, even of a moral nature, has been renewed.’19

  Put another way, for Bell there is a contradiction between the drive for efficiency in modern capitalism and the drive for self-realisation in modern culture. Culture is all-important for Bell, first, because art has taken upon itself (under the mantle of modernism) constantly to seek ‘innovative forms and sensations,’ and second, because culture is now no longer a source of authoritative morality but ‘a producer of new and titillating sensations.’20 For Bell, modernism was ending by 1930 and exhausted by 1960. ‘Society and art have come together in the market so that aesthetic aura and conceptions of high culture have disappeared.’ But the endless quest for novelty was taken up by the mass media, which themselves largely took form in the 1920s and adopted the same quest of feeding new images to people, unsettling traditional conventions and ‘highlighting … aberrant and quirky behaviour.’21 Along the way, the traditional sociological categories of age, gender, class, and religion became less reliable guides to behaviour – ‘lifestyle, value-choice and aesthetic prefere
nce have become more idiosyncratic and personal.’22 The result, says Bell, is chaos and disunity. In the past, most cultures and societies were unified – classical culture in the pursuit of virtue, Christian society unified around divinely ordained hierarchies, and early industrial culture unified around ‘work, order, and rationalisation.’ In contemporary society, however, there has been a massive dislocation. While the techno-economic side of things is still ruled by ‘efficiency, rationality, orderliness, and discipline … the culture is governed by immediate gratification of the senses and the emotions and the indulgence of the undisciplined self.’ The contradictions, for Bell, imply a major change in the way we live, but this has to do not only with capitalism: ‘The exhaustion of modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self, and the meaninglessness of monolithic political chants, all indicate that a long era is coming to a slow close.’ There is a heavy price to pay for modernism: ‘Modernity is individualism, the effort of individuals to remake themselves, and, where necessary, to remake society in order to allow design and choice…. It implies the rejection of any “naturally” ascribed or divinely ordained order, of external authority, and of collective authority in favour of the self as the sole point of reference for action.’23 ‘Under modernity there can be no question about the moral authority of the self. The only question is that of how the self is to be fulfilled – by hedonism, by acquisitiveness, by faith, by the privatisation of morality or by sensationalism.’24 Technology, of course, had something to do with this change, in particular the automobile. ‘The closed car became the cabinet particulier of the middle class, the place where adventurous young people could shed their sexual inhibitions and break the old taboos.’25 Advertising also played its part, ‘emphasising prodigality rather than frugality, or lavish display rather than asceticism.’ Financial services helped, so that debt, once a source of shame, became a component of the lifestyle.26