The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

T THE HE IILLUSION LLUSION OF OF FFREEDOM REEDOM AND AND EEQUALITY QUALITY Richard RichardStivers Stivers

“This “Thisisisaawell wellwritten writtenand andengaging engagingtext textproduced producedby byaaperson personwho whoisis deeply deeply immersed immersed inin social social theory, theory, which which he he wields wields inin aa sophisticated sophisticated and and wide-ranging wide-ranging way. way. I I would would locate locate his his writing writing inin aa distinctive distinctive genre genre ofof sociological sociological writing, writing, which which might might aptly aptly be be characterized characterized asas sociological sociological meditation. meditation. What What makes makes his his book book particularly particularly compelling compelling isis the the fact fact that that itit tackles tackles the the most most central central and and enduring enduring issues issues ofof our our age, age, which which he he addresses addresses inin aa manner manner that that transcends transcends the the immediacies immediacies ofof everyday everyday economic economic and and political political reality reality and and appreciates appreciates both both the thehistorical historicalroots rootsand andthe thedeep deepstructural structuralfoundations.” foundations.” — —Peter PeterKivisto, Kivisto,Augustana AugustanaCollege College “This “This outstanding outstanding and and timely timely book book faces faces head-on head-on current current political political surroundingfreedom freedomand andequality.” equality.” issues issuessurrounding — —Norman NormanK. K.Denzin, Denzin,University UniversityofofIllinois Illinois

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Richard Richard Stivers Stivers isis Distinguished Distinguished Professor Professor ofof Sociology Sociology atat Illinois Illinois State State University University and and the the author author ofof Shades Shades ofof Loneliness: Loneliness: Pathologies Pathologies ofof aa Technological Technological Society Society and and Technology Technology as as Magic: Magic: The The Triumph Triumph ofofthe theIrrational. Irrational.

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Richard Richard Stivers Stivers

Arguing Arguingthat thatthe theideology ideologyof offreedom freedom and and equality equality today today bears bears little little resemblance resemblanceto toits itseighteenth-century eighteenth-century counterpart, counterpart,Richard RichardStivers Stiversexamines examines how how these these values values have have been been radically radically transformed transformed in in aa technological technological civilization. civilization. Once Once thought thought of of as as aa kind kind of of personal personal property property and and an an aspect aspectof ofthe thedignity dignityof ofthe theindividual, individual, the the context context of of freedom freedom and and equality equality today today isis technological technological before before itit isis political politicaland andeconomic economicand andisisalso alsonow now largely largelythought thoughtof ofin incollective collectiveterms. terms. Focusing Focusingon onthe thework workof ofJacques JacquesEllul Ellul and and Max Max Weber, Weber, Stivers Stivers traces traces the the development developmentof offreedom freedomand andequality equality in in Enlightenment Enlightenment thought thought and and American American history history and and then then proceeds proceeds to to discuss discuss their their current current ideologies, ideologies, realities, realities,and andillusions. illusions.

The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

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The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

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RICHARD STIVERS

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, www.sunypress.edu Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stivers, Richard. The illusion of freedom and equality / Richard Stivers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7914-7511-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Liberty. 2. Equality. 3. Technological innovations—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. hm1266.s75 2008 323.44—dc22 2007041838

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To my wife Janet and our life together

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It is not truth that rules the world but illusions. Kierkegaard The people will fancy an appearance of freedom; illusion will be their native land. Saint-Just

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C o nt e n t s

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction 1 C H A P T E R T WO

Freedom and Equality in Enlightenment Thought and American History 12 CHAPTER THREE

Freedom and Equality as the Modern Ideology 29 CHAPTER FOUR

The Reality of Freedom and Equality 63 CHAPTER FIVE

The Illusion of Freedom and Equality 94 Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Diane Bjorklund, Kim Goudreau, Brian Ott, Grant Shoffstall, and Jim van der Laan read the entire manuscript and offered suggestions, many of which I incorporated into the text. Anne Wortham, Bob Hunt, and Wally Mead provided me with references. Sharon Foiles typed the many drafts of the manuscript with patience and skill. The Earhart Foundation provided a research fellowship to begin the book. My family, Janet, Mark, Michael, and Rachelle, listened to me with affection even when I was stumbling after the right idea. The talented editors and staff at the State University of New York Press were both courteous and professional at every stage of production.

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CHAPTER 1

5 Introduction Freedom and equality are on everyone’s lips, are endlessly proclaimed by politicians, and seem to be self-evident terms until we apply them to current events. For instance, President George W. Bush talks about terrorist evildoers as the enemies of freedom. His opponents point to him as an enemy of freedom because he has enlarged the power of government to place its citizens under more complete surveillance. Perhaps President Bush is close to some 1960s radicals who proclaimed “No freedom for the enemies of freedom.” His extension of this view would seem to be: “No freedom for anyone until the enemies of freedom have been destroyed.” But I am not going to discuss politics in this book. Consequently, few will take it seriously in an age in which every issue has been politicized. This book will be dismissed by those who live for politics or who enjoy it as a kind of entertainment. Everything is political. How can anyone deny it? And yet everything is concurrently an economic issue. We think everyone acts out of self-interest, most often economic self-interest. Global capitalism has cowed the political Left; the Left has run out of alternatives to capitalism now that it is global. Some even maintain that global capitalism portends the end of the nation-state and of politics as we have known it for the past two centuries. So what is it—politics or economics? Is the former reducible to the latter under global capitalism, just as the reverse was the case under mercantilism? Again, this book will be immediately rejected by those who think that global capitalism is the most important factor in the organization of modern society.

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By contrast, I maintain that behind global capitalism and the political state is the technological system. As I indicate in chapter 3, modern technology includes both machines and nonmaterial techniques such as bureaucracy, advertising, and propaganda. Historians of technology have demonstrated that the nonmaterial techniques as developed and used by the political state were well developed prior to the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism. Indeed, following Max Weber and Jacques Ellul, I maintain that capitalism is a form of economic rationality and that technology cannot be regarded as an epiphenomenon of capitalism. Whether used for political, religious, or economic purposes, technique is the most powerful, efficient means of acting. In all its manifestations, technology is driven by the will to power. Technology is the single most important factor in the evolution of modern societies. As we will see, however, it exacerbates political and economic conflicts all over the world. Without the technological system global capitalism is impossible. Technology is the context within which to understand the meaning of freedom and equality today. I rely heavily on Jacques Ellul’s theory of the technological society, which I summarize in chapter 3. Ellul’s views on technology run parallel to those of Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Arnold Gehlen, Friedrich Juenger, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Anthony Giddens, among others. What sets his views apart is his understanding of technology as a sociological force. Ellul explains how technology became the chief determining factor in the organization of modern society. Technology supplants experience and fragments and thus sterilizes human symbolization. Hence, social institutions as symbolically mediated experiences are replaced by organizations, such as bureaucracy, and psychological techniques, such as advertising and self-help manuals. Peculiar to Ellul is the understanding that technology has been made sacred in the modern world. This is the cultural motivation to rely almost exclusively on technology to “solve” all natural and social problems. Concurrently, technology has become a system (the interrelationship and coordination of specific technologies) and as such our environment or milieu. In short, Ellul’s sociological understanding of technology is more complete than that of any other theorist. To be fair, Weber wrote decades before technology emerged as system and milieu.

Introduction

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Many have accused Ellul of being a determinist, but this is based on a misunderstanding. Ellul’s determinism is sociological not metaphysical. All societies control the actions of their citizens through a common culture and related institutions. All societies promote conformity. Freedom is always possible, but it necessarily involves conflict and nonconformity. Of course, societies differ in the degree of control they exercise. Freedom in a totalitarian society comes at a much higher price. The most important facts are rarely those of current events. Underlying current events are longer term historical structures. The Annales School of History in France and German sociologist Norbert Elias called attention to the relationship between structure and history.1 The deeper and more important the structure, the longer it takes to play itself out. Elias’ “civilizing process” took at least six centuries before culminating in the nineteenth century. Events are of short duration and tend to be less important in understanding a society than the underlying structures around which events fluctuate. Events can be symbolic “triggers” that set a social movement in motion, but they only have this power on account of their relationship to the deeper structures. Economic structures today such as global capitalism are deeper and of longer duration than political events, but technological systems are of greater depth and historical length. Consequently, I will center my attention on a relatively few facts about technology and draw inferences about them for an understanding of freedom and equality today. The political and economic meanings of freedom and equality in the Enlightenment, whose ideological remains are still with us, work to conceal the technological context. Freedom and equality have enormous importance in the history of Western civilization. In the highly acclaimed Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, a historical sociology of the cultural value of freedom from the time of Greek civilization to the Middle Ages, Orlando Patterson states: “No one would deny that today freedom stands unchallenged as the supreme value of the Western world.”2 He attempts to show that freedom is “a tripartite value,” whose three meanings are interrelated in history but differentially emphasized at various times. Personal freedom is freedom to act as one chooses to do without coercion but within the limits placed by other people’s expectations and choices. Sovereignal freedom is absolute freedom, the ability to do whatever one desires and even impose

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that choice on others. Civic freedom is the freedom to participate in the governance of a community. Civic freedom is political in nature and is often called “liberty.” Personal freedom is individual freedom set within the moral expectations of the community. Sovereignal freedom assumes both individual and political forms because it is about the power to impose one’s will on others if necessary. Each of these types of freedom has various shades of meaning, for example, personal freedom can become inner or spiritual freedom.3 In Sovereign Virtue, legal scholar Ronald Dworkin argues that equality is the most important civic virtue. In discussing the various forms of equality—equality of welfare (in the broad sense of the term), equality of resources, and political equality—he maintains that equality is more important than liberty: “Any genuine contest between liberty and equality is a contest liberty must lose.”4 Dworkin says this in a political context in which, he argues, there is near universal agreement that government should demonstrate equal respect and concern for the lives of its citizens. Liberty must never be at the expense of the welfare of others. Dworkin’s well-reasoned book illustrates the danger of analyzing any virtue or value as a more or less autonomous ideal. All virtues and values take on their meaning in terms of the context in which they are discussed and the actions to which they are applied. A different dimension of equality, for example, comes to light when it is paired with the ideal of justice. Justice and liberty bring out different aspects of equality in part because justice and liberty are themselves interrelated. All I am saying here is that the understanding of any virtue or value necessitates the exploration of its larger cultural and historical context. In what I consider the best treatment of Western civilization, The Betrayal of the West, Jacques Ellul identifies three values that are unique to the West: the individual, reason, and freedom. Ellul recognizes that all civilizations are unique in the total configuration of their values and that there is no way to establish an objective hierarchy of civilizations. Consequently, he is not arguing for the superiority of the West. In the long evolution of these closely-related values, individuality became the “subtle, infinitely delicate interplay of reason and freedom.”5 The free and rational individual reaches its highest expression in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It is here we

Introduction

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find a defense and justification of these three values. Before these values became a political project in the Enlightenment, they required a long period of cultural maturation. Reason was central to the emergence of individual freedom in two ways. First, it led to the concept of self-control. One limits the expression of emotions out of concern for others, because of a dependence on others, or a fear of reprisal. At its best, self-control does not “repress” the expression of emotion altogether, but channels and directs emotion for the sake of the other. For example, I do not immediately say what comes to mind in relationships because part of the time it is harmful or destructive. To be in control of my emotions means that I reflect even if only tacitly before I speak or act. This necessarily means that positive feelings are subject to a momentary check as well. Individual reason can free me from the tyranny of instinct, but as well it can be used to reflect about external constraints on freedom. I can think about the ways in which cultural and political control are exercised. Out of this reflection comes the realization that the individual and the group are sometimes at odds. The principle of civil disobedience is perhaps the highest expression of individual freedom: I do not deny the community’s right to create norms and enforce them but retain the right to violate an unjust law. Hence, I willingly accept the punishment for my free action. Freedom, then, necessarily involves conflict with self and others.6 Unfortunately, reason can readily become instrumental rationality; freedom can easily become what Patterson calls “sovereignal freedom,” the will to impose one’s will on others. Ellul notes that Western civilization betrayed its own values, always imperfectly realized in practice, over the past two centuries. The power of science and technology, the growth and centralization of power in the political state, the emergence of corporate capitalism, the centralization of power in bureaucracy and the mass media, were both cause and effect of imperialism and racism. The West imposed its power on those less technologically advanced and ultimately on its own. Going beyond Western civilization, Louis Dumont refers to equality and individualism as the modern ideology. His argument is not so much that Western civilization imposed this ideology on developing countries (although it attempted to do this on occasion) but that the conditions of modern life make necessary the modern ideology. The latter is less a self-conscious choice than a justification

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for a set of conditions after the fact. This set of conditions is sometimes referred to as the “American Way of Life,” an existence defined in terms of individual consumption. Dumont contrasts the modern ideology of individualism and equality with the traditional ideology of holism and hierarchy. Holism implies hierarchy, just as individualism implies equality. In the traditional ideology, as least when it worked well, hierarchy was constrained by a sense of the entire community. Differences in status and power were limited by the sense that the overall community is more important than any individual or group’s relative superiority. To be placed in a position of authority meant that one should exercise that authority in a responsible way.7 At the same time holism was unimaginable without authority or hierarchy. Order meant a hierarchy of groups based on age, sex, and eventually occupation. Hierarchy required mutual responsibility for those who exercised authority and those who obeyed it. Hierarchy is based on the idea of complementarity. Take men and women for instance. Each group has certain responsibilities based on a division of labor. Even if men have authority over women, that authority is mitigated by the idea of complementarity (and even the reversal of roles). Each group has authority within its domain even if one group has higher status. Sometimes higher status goes with a function that was at one time perceived to be more critical for the shortterm survival of the group, for example, men as hunters and warriors. Complementarity is based on cooperation and militates against overt competition.8 Hierarchy breaks down when the power of a higher status group becomes absolute, an end in itself. When this occurs, holism suffers in the sense that it must be imposed. As a result, covert competition ensues. In the modern ideology, equality replaces hierarchy, and individualism replaces holism. In the modern world, order is transitory and is the result of an endless competition for power. Each group is independent of the other and is forced to compete for the scarce resources of money, information, and political influence. We often see the dangers of excessive individualism but not those of equality, and we fail to see the connection between the two. If we redefine individualism as individual freedom, then the modern ideology contains freedom and equality as its two main components. Are freedom and equality in conflict? Perhaps not ideologically, but certainly in practice, Alexis de Tocqueville argued. There are

Introduction

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times when freedom and equality are in perfect harmony, so that in a fully participatory democracy, for instance, each citizen is both free and equal. But Americans, he argued, prefer equality to freedom. Freedom involves conflict, constant vigilance, and courage. Social equality, by contrast, is more pleasurable in that one becomes more like others and merges with them in groups, associations, and crowds. Equality, unlike freedom, can be institutionalized. Centralized government and strong public opinion move equality toward uniformity and are a threat to freedom. Tocqueville concluded that both citizens and government in a centralized democracy love equality. The latter is an advocate of equality because, Tocqueville argued, the more alike people become, the easier they are to govern.9 Whether his argument was correct about America in the early nineteenth century or not, he raised an essential question. The collectivistic tendencies of the modern world are a greater threat to freedom than to equality. One of my main arguments is that both freedom and equality are heavily collectivized in a technological civilization. The liberalism of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on individual freedom and equality has been ideologically transformed to justify our highly collectivized postmodern (technological) existence. This outdated ideology, liberalism, allows modern societies to maintain a façade of individualism. Liberalism as an ideology was in part an ethical account of freedom and equality. Even if morality, as in some liberal theories, was an unintended consequence of self-interested action, freedom and equality still possessed a moral cast. Today, freedom and equality have been thoroughly aestheticized. Freedom has become consumer choice, right (as choice and desire), and technological possibility. Equality is related to the enjoyment of power as plural and cultural equality. In stripping its citizens of moral responsibility and freedom, a technological society turns all issues and choices into aesthetical ones. Our “freedom” as consumers, for example, is compensation for our lack of freedom in relation to technology in all its forms: bureaucracy, corporation, government, and mass media. Beneath the illusion of the equality of pluralism lies the uniformity of statistical measurement and control that is imposed on us. Ideology and myth are “essentially contested concepts,” that is, they are terms the meaning of which cannot be agreed upon by almost anyone.10 My truth is for you ideology. Without attempting to impose order on the definitional anarchy of the terms (especially

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ideology), and without providing a history of these concepts, I will follow the lead of two writers, Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Ellul: the former for an analysis of ideology and the latter for a description of the relationship between the concepts of ideology and myth in today’s world. Paul Ricoeur notes that there are three major concepts of ideology: ideology as integration or identity; ideology as legitimation of hierarchy and dissimulation; and ideology as distortion. He identifies the first concept with Geertz, the second with Weber, and the third with Marx. Ricoeur’s achievement is to show how the three concepts are interrelated so that each is necessary for a fuller understanding of ideology in history.11 Ideology provides a society with an ideal image of itself and thus makes possible the integration of its members. This integrative function of ideology is invariably related to a story about the founding of one’s society. But it also contains a project for existence in the here and now. Furthermore, ideology contains a strong element of belief which acts both to absolutize the ideal image and to simplify it. As Ricoeur notes, ideology is a “grid or code for giving an overall view, not only of the group but also of history and, ultimately of the world.”12 But the absolutizing and simplifying operations of ideology at the very moment they provide for integration also make for dissimulation. That is, ideology tends to become rigid, unwilling or unable to assimilate new experiences to its grid. The second concept of ideology is about the legitimation of authority. The exercise of power invariably exceeds cultural authority on the one hand and what people are willing to accept on the other hand. The result is dissimulation on the part of those in power. A large part of the integrating effect of ideology is to provide a rationale for domination, for the structure of authority. Legitimating authority entails getting those without authority to believe in the symbolic meaning of the power wielded over them. Common meaning notwithstanding, the relation between the claim of authority (for legitimacy) and the belief of the others (response to the claim) is asymmetrical. As Ricoeur perceptively observes, “There is always more in the claim which comes from the authority than in the belief which is returned to it.” He calls this the “real surplus-value.”13 Authority requires of us more than our less-than-fanatical belief can endure. When the integrating purpose of supplying a society with an ideal image comes into contact with the system of authority, both

Introduction

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dissimulation and distortion occur. More than anything else it is the system of authority that resists the new experiences and new meanings by which an ideology could renew itself, but which could prove dangerous to the extant authority. Finally, we come to the Marxian concept of distortion. The ruling class can only see the world in terms of its own interests. Ideology is set forth at the expense of those who do not comprise the ruling class. Distortion is sometimes referred to as inversion—an inversion of reality. We mistake ideology for material reality, on the one hand, and we distort reality so that it fits our expectations and desires at the expense of others, on the other hand. Marx’s singular contribution was to maintain that ideology’s justification of domination can be more critical than its more primitive integrating purpose. Now it appears that all three concepts or purposes of ideology are required for a balanced view. Yet the integrating and distorting functions vary in importance in history. Louis Dumont’s study of hierarchy in India and subsequent comparisons with capitalistic societies is quite revealing.14 As we have seen, hierarchical relationships often express more a complementarity of roles than sheer vertical authority. As a consequence, the integrating function of ideology has priority over the structure of power that it helps to establish. Hierarchy in traditional societies is radically different from hierarchy in modern societies—different assumptions, logic, and ideology. In traditional societies the community (the whole) takes precedence over the individual (the part) and any particular social category (gender, occupation). All oppositions, male/female, old/young, warrior/farmer, leader/follower, are dialectically related. Each category needs its opposite, is defined in terms of its opposite, so that both categories together form a totality—the community. The various social categories are not mutually exclusive and a higher category’s authority over a lower is tightly circumscribed. As Dumont puts it, “Essentially hierarchy is the encompassing of the contrary.”15 Modern hierarchy, by contrast, is based on a logic of mutually exclusive categories. Rather than a communitarian ideology, we find here an individualistic ideology so that the hierarchy is not a totality in any symbolic sense. In this situation competition is emphasized over cooperation. The winners and losers are members of mutually exclusive categories. Community is narrowed to the community of winners—the ruling class. This is the point at which ideology’s

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function of distortion is most marked. For now the ruling class, which has its power only loosely checked by a sense of a moral community as the totality of societal members, has to suggest that the current ideology still applies to everyone. Social classes become mutually exclusive communities in respect to power and its benefits but still have a common ideology. I am not convinced that the difference between a communitarian ideology in which hierarchy is transformed into relationships of complementarity and an individualistic ideology in which hierarchy devolves into mutual antagonism is sufficient to explain the difference between traditional and modern society. The missing ingredient in making such a comparison is power. There are two points I wish to make in this regard. The first is that power—technological, economic, political, military—is not a constant in history. There has been, for instance, an uninterrupted growth of and centralization of power in the political state since the fifteenth century.16 There is no comparison between the forms and extent of power in traditional societies and those in modern societies. The second is that there is an inverse relationship between power and values.17 The more human power grows, the less efficacious values are. If there is one law of history, this is certainly it. Applying these assertions to the question of ideology, I think one can safely conclude that by the nineteenth century in the West, the power of the capitalist classes was enormous. Moreover, this power was, as Marx noted, only possible at the expense of the working class. In this context ideology’s main purpose was distortion. Adam Smith’s ideology had to assert rhetorically that capitalism benefits everyone (“the greatest good for the greatest number . . .”). The main value of the capitalistic ideology was success. But what is success, if not the moment of power? I succeed when you fail. As I will argue in chapter 3, power today has become abstract, that is, it is centered in technology, bureaucracy, and the media: in the technological system. Now ideology does not justify a ruling class but a “ruling system.” Freedom and equality are ideological concepts that are in the service of technical information, a power that has come to surpass that of capital. As Ricoeur notes, it may not be appropriate to use the same concept (ideology) to refer to traditional societies where the integrative dimension is so apparent and to modern societies where the distortive aspect is so pronounced.18 Ideology would appear to be

Introduction

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the result of a growing rational and conscious dimension of culture that exists side by side with its unconscious dimension. By contrast, myth appears to be more spontaneous, unconscious, and universal. The most important myths are religious and take the form of cosmogonies (theories of creation, of the beginning of time and the end of time). Myth survives into the modern world even with the presence of ideology. Jacques Ellul maintains that whereas the great ideologies of capitalism, communism, and socialism during the Cold War divided modern and modernizing societies, the myth of technological progress united them on a more primitive unconscious level.19 In this book I will show how the ideology of freedom and equality, the foundational ideology of all ethnic and national ideologies, is related to the myth of technological utopianism. Chapter 2 describes the meaning of freedom and equality in Enlightenment thought and in American history. Chapter 3 articulates the various ideological meanings of freedom and equality in a technological civilization. Freedom is defined as consumer choice, as right, and as technological possibility; equality is defined as plural equality on the one hand and as cultural and communicative equality on the other hand. Chapter 4 demonstrates that the reality of freedom and equality is the reverse of the ideology. It took over 150 years for Marx’s concept of ideology as the inversion of reality to be fully realized. The reality of freedom is forced consumerism, legal process, and technological necessity. The reality of equality is group conformity and competition on the one hand and uniformity on the other hand. Chapter 5 arrives at certain conclusions and explores the implications of this interpretation for living as free and equal individuals in a technological society. This chapter offers no solutions (as if there were any) but suggests only in a general way an attitude and conviction we must maintain if we are to begin to resist the loss of freedom and equality. The meaning of freedom and equality will only resurface in the common effort to regain control of technology.

CHAPTER 2

5 Freedom and Equality in Enlightenment Thought and American History Freedom and equality are historical concepts whose meaning depends on the contexts from which they arise and to which they are applied. In other words, they are concepts without fixed meanings. J. R. Pole argues that “equality is a complex concept, which even at its most philosophical level could not aim at a single goal.” Moreover, equality is not a unified concept but rather a “metaphor or a synonym for social conditions achieved or aspired to,” a protest against one’s situation in relation to that of others.1 Orlando Patterson says much the same about the concept of freedom: that it emerged in opposition to slavery and servitude. Patterson argues, “People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery as its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.”2 Concepts such as freedom and equality have an outer surface of ideology but their core is existential. Ideology provides an intellectual meaning to important existential concepts. It can either provide a rationale for past actions or the motivation for future ones. For example, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690) was a self-conscious attempt to justify the Whig revolution of 1688 in England.3 At the same time his writings were the inspiration for the American Revolution of 1776. Carl Becker notes that Locke’s ideas appeared as “sheer common sense” to the colonists.4 When ideology is perceived to be the clarification of that which has already been experienced, it is powerful indeed. When ideology is commensurate with common sense, it 12

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has become diffuse. At this point the concepts embodied in the ideology are liberated; they take on a life of their own. Autonomous concepts can then be applied to new circumstances and thus acquire new meanings and even resurface in new ideologies. In the Enlightenment, for instance, freedom and equality acquired economic and political meanings related to the individual; by the second half of the nineteenth century, freedom and equality were increasingly defined in relation to the group, the organization, and the nation. Nationalistic and ethnic ideologies provided an intellectual context for the redefinition of the concepts of freedom and equality. The upshot of this is that the relationships between ideology and its concepts and between concepts and lived reality run in both directions. Ideology and its concepts control people’s experiences at the same time they express and clarify them. The history of freedom and equality is likewise a history of related concepts such as reason, nature, natural law, natural right, and social compact or contract. In the Middle Ages, a Christian cosmology held sway. Christian freedom meant, among other things, a free obedience to God and freedom from the world. Humans were equal as God’s creation and as recipients of God’s love. Freedom and equality in society were a different matter altogether. Despite the rare Christian dissident, Christians chose obedience to the state and church. Hierarchy, both Christian and secular, embodied God’s will. Princes derived authority from God not the people but entered into a compact with the people to rule them justly. If their governance became tyrannical, their subjects were not obligated to obey them. The right to disobey had to be affirmed by the Pope who was to investigate the charges against the ruler.5 Freedom was tightly circumscribed. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas argued that natural law was beneath eternal law as expressed in the Bible and church edict but above human law. Natural law was discernible by normative reason and thus was a way of learning about God’s law.6 God was believed to maintain an active presence in nature as well as in human affairs. Christian equality necessitated both Church and state to treat individual Christians with love and respect at the same time requiring their full acceptance of the social hierarchy, the “three orders.” The ideal hierarchy of medieval society, only imperfectly realized, was based on function. The most important function was prayer and moral guidance; priests occupied the top rung of the hierarchy.

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Second in importance was the political/military function with the aristocracy in charge. The third function was work; everyone else including the small middle class was located here.7 A stronger sense of freedom emerges in the Renaissance. This neoclassical humanism emphasized human reason and the freedom to submit to one’s own moral convictions and to set one’s own goals.8 This freedom was still limited by a sense that reason was teleological. The implication was that one could rely on one’s own reason without the need for church guidance. At the same time reason extended its dominion over nature. The latter could be understood on the basis of mathematical principles. Nature’s hierarchy gives way to the idea of the homogeneity of nature, which was fully developed later by Descartes.9 But history as well was viewed as homogenous with the principle of continuity.10 Consequently both nature and history could be subject to science. God’s existence was not in dispute, but He recedes to the extent that nature once created is subject to autonomous laws rather than God’s active presence. The ascendancy of reason over faith was furthered by a crisis of belief in the sixteenth century. As Lucien Febvre demonstrates, the intellectuals in particular were “between” belief systems. Unable to shake off Christianity and without an alternative worldview, they were stuck. Science, occultism, and so forth were not able to provide what humanism accomplished in the Enlightenment—a theory of nature, man, and society.11 The most important change in the meaning of freedom and equality in the Enlightenment was the extension of their context from private life to public life: Freedom and equality acquired political and economic meanings. This was accomplished in large part because of population growth and mobility, an increase in the power of public opinion, and especially the rise in numbers, wealth, and influence of the middle classes. The rising middle classes perceived that the extant political and economic order was unjust.12 Enlightenment ideology was first and foremost middle-class ideology. It would be hard to do justice to the wealth of treatises and essays during this period. For my purposes I want to contrast British and French thought in the Enlightenment in the persons of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The former represents a type of liberalism that greatly influenced the American Revolution and the founding of America; the latter, a kind of humanism that informed the French Revolution and with the concept of a “social contract” aided

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the American Revolution as well. In these two writers (with occasional brief discussions of related authors such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant), we can discover the tension in Enlightenment thought between individualism and holism. Are freedom and equality to be defined exclusively in terms of the individual, or are they to be articulated in an interpersonal or societal context?

JOHN LOCKE AND LIBERALISM

John Locke wrote that individuals are according to their nature free and equal. Humans possess natural rights, and these rights are equal for all members of the species. These rights include: (1) the right to life; (2) the right to freedom from the arbitrary control of one’s actions and possessions; (3) and the right to property.13 This final right, as we will see later, introduces inconsistencies if not contradictions into his theory. Above all, the liberalism of the late seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, was a champion of the individual. Although theorists continued to discuss nature, nature’s laws, and human nature, they examined them from a scientific rather than a religious perspective. Locke’s psychology was a combination of rational hedonism and “sensationalism.” Human beings, in this view, are rational in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.14 Reason is self-interested, rather than normative (a conclusion David Hume reached in an even more extreme way). Rational hedonism, for Locke, rests on a bed of sensations. Eschewing a psychology that humans possess innate ideas, he articulated the view that ideas come from experience, from sensations we receive from both natural and social worlds.15 If human beings are not innately moral, then one has to explain how they become moral. First, Locke regards moral distinctions as essentially mathematical (along with Neoplatonists); moral judgment, therefore, follows reason in an unambiguous way.16 Second, he tied moral distinction to hedonism so that humans could perceive the “utility” of moral actions.17 Unlike Thomas Hobbes, Locke believed that humans were capable of moral selfgovernance. Locke’s implicit “utilitarianism” was fully realized later with Jeremy Bentham. Locke’s state of nature is society before and after the introduction of money. In the first state of nature before the introduction of

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money or private property, humans are equal in the rights they possess and their reason. But everything changes after the introduction of money. It creates differential reason and differential rights, both a reflection of social class based on the possession of or lack of property.18 Locke derived the right to property from the right of survival and the right to control the labor of one’s body.19 To this natural right to own property, he adds two dimensions of human nature: the rational ability to make contracts, and the desire to have more than one needs. This latter desire introduces two elements into our relationships with others, continuous competitiveness and domination. Locke’s human nature in the second state of nature (after the introduction of money) is less inclined to follow natural law and respect the rights of others. His theory is at best inconsistent on the issue of human nature. In the second state of nature natural man is social man, specifically “bourgeois man.”20 The results of competition and the desire for the unlimited acquisition of property result in differential rationality and differential rights, and even differential natural law. The latter refers to the moral equality of all humans and implies the idea of human rights. Previously, we saw, Locke had articulated the rights to life, freedom, and property. The right to property, which historically had been defined in a limited way, for example, one’s need for subsistence and reasonable pleasure, was now defined in an unlimited way. Locke believed in the “moral rationality of unlimited accumulation.”21 What made unlimited accumulation moral was the assumption that some men are better off working for others than managing their own property. That is, some humans do not possess the instrumental rationality to manage property so that it turns a profit. Consequently, humans are differentially rational, which in turn means that the human rights to own property and to freedom are differential. Without full rationality one cannot be completely free or equal. The introduction of money in the second state of nature (state of society) changes the natural rights of the first state. Locke maintains that humans implicitly consent to the institution of money. Hence the right to the unlimited accumulation of property is less “pure” than the other rights.22 Because the original right to property in the first state of nature was limited by everyone’s equal right to subsistence, it was necessary for Locke to assume that the new right to unlimited property would not infringe upon anyone’s right to subsistence. At the same time, however, Locke realized that economic

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competition under a money economy had greatly increased from the original state of nature (an imaginary construction).23 Civil society becomes a market society for Locke. A market society is a society of individuals whose economic relationships are fundamental. As Louis Dumont observes, the relationship to things, for example, money, property, takes precedence over human relationships.24 Although religion, morality, politics, and the economy are interconnected through the concepts of natural law and natural rights, in effect Locke and other British writers like Adam Smith made the economy autonomous. Prior to this, the economy was viewed as an aspect of the political process just as earlier it had been religiously and morally circumscribed. For the economy to become free from political and moral control, it had to be perceived as a “self-contained system,” but one with an “internal moral purpose.”25 Before Bentham’s full-blown utilitarianism, Locke had argued moral value in such terms. Moral actions were useful to the survival and well-being of the individual and society. The unlimited accumulation of property as well was morally beneficial to those individuals deficient in reason, who could not be trusted to be property owners, but who could at the very least become useful and self-sufficient employees. In the transformation of normative reason into instrumental rationality, the “moral” economy supplanted the moral individual. As an indirect founder of liberal democracy, Locke categorically asserted the primacy of the will of the majority. People’s consent to their governance through an implicit contract between the people and the ruler creates a truly civil society. The majority has the right to influence legislation especially with respect to property and contracts. Locke only approved of monarchy as long as the people remained the source of legislative power.26 Locke goes so far as to grant the majority the right to revolution. Just as reason establishes the basis for government—contract—so does it provide a justification for revolution—tyranny.27 A government is legitimate to the extent that it allows natural rights to be freely exercised, especially the right to individual property. In contradictory fashion, Locke allows the majority unlimited power (something Tocqueville warned against). Political power, legislative power specifically, must be supreme to establish and sustain the institutions of private property, for example, contracts. In the middle-class “revolution” against the aristocracy, the extension of

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and even definition of property was crucial. Moveable private property, the wealth of the middle classes, had to be protected over against unmovable private property in the form of land. According to C. B. Macpherson, “Locke had no reluctance to hand over to civil society all natural rights and powers, including possessions and land, because the majority determined the ends of society.”28 So if Locke fails to see the danger in the tyranny of the majority, he likewise overlooks the possibility that the majority would turn into a minority—the owners of vast amounts of private property. Once again Locke’s theory of the two states of nature comes into play. Differential rationality and different rights suggest that the will of the majority is the will of the majority of property owners. Consequently legislative democracy of Locke’s sort and that of America after him was exclusively for the owners of private property. In this way, Locke could be assured that the majority would never threaten the institutions of private property. Finally, the right to revolution is reserved for the owners of private property, for only they are fully rational and fully vested in society.29 Locke’s ideas expressed the movement of the middle classes to free themselves from medieval religious and political control of property in which the immovable property of land was the basis of political power and wealth. Locke’s achievement sadly disenfranchised the working classes and the poor—those without substantial property. Both political and economic freedom and equality were redefined in terms of class so that large numbers of citizens lost the freedom and equality that they were originally guaranteed as equal possessors of natural rights in the original state of nature. Perhaps ideology has never been more apparent than in the political theory of John Locke. We will have to wait until the nineteenth century, however, before various theories of liberal democracy arrive. Recall that for Locke the form of government was less important than the power of the general will, the will of the majority of property owners.

ROUSSEAU AND HUMANISM

Jean-Jacques Rousseau espoused the values of freedom and equality but in a much more nuanced way than John Locke. Rousseau, and for that matter many humanists, placed less emphasis on the

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autonomous individual than did Locke and other liberals. For Rousseau freedom is first and foremost moral freedom that is concurrently a check on selfish human instincts and a way of protesting the undue influence of others. He extends freedom to civil society as the liberty of the people expressed in the “general will.”30 Equality too resides in virtue. As Tzvetan Todorov notes about Rousseau: “True morality, true justice, true virtue all presuppose equality.”31 Inequality, as we will see later, is a consequence of solitude. But freedom and equality are a consequence of a lived not merely a theoretical morality. Todorov describes the three tenets of humanist morality: “the recognition of equal dignity for all members of the species; the elevation of the particular human being other than me as the ultimate goal of my action; finally, the preference for the act freely chosen over one performed under constraint.”32 The emphasis on virtue demonstrates that for humanists the proper social unit for realizing freedom and equality is the moral community.33 Rousseau’s understanding of human nature is dynamic; it is dependent upon the type of society and the response the individual makes to others in that society. Moreover, he uses the ideal constructions of a state of nature, a just city, and a universal individual as a way of criticizing human existence in societies that are far from perfect.34 The upshot is that Rousseau is not naïve about human nature and society; rather he is a realist who clearly separates the ideal from the real. In the state of nature prior to the existence of human society, humans were both happy and good (not in a moral sense but in a natural or unreflective way). Natural man exists in and for himself and is free of envy and the desire to dominate others. Natural man loves himself first and foremost but like some animals is capable of sympathy and mutual aid. Just as importantly, natural man is not possessed by the desire for money, private property, and consumer goods.35 Rousseau here is close to Karl Marx on the detrimental effect of commerce and especially capitalism on human nature. The state of society makes natural man unhappy and evil. In his view, human institutions and the social order itself are responsible for this sorry state because they are a consequence of “amourpropre,” which, according to Todorov, is best translated as vanity.36 Clearly Rousseau understands the reciprocal relationship between the individual and society. Vanity in turn gives rise to envy. Therefore

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social conflict is inevitable and pervasive. Simultaneously humans have the need to be accepted, to be admired, and to be part of a group. The transition from the state of nature to the state of society then is effected by a “social contract” (once again, a mental construct) between citizens and their rulers. Rousseau believed that private property and its resultant inequality are behind the concepts of justice and injustice. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes about Rousseau, “The institution of property and the growth of wealth lead to inequality, oppression, enslavement, and consequent theft and other crimes.”37 The state evolves as an agency of law creation and enforcement, which can apply the concept of justice to the conflicts that economic inequality engenders. Once constituted, however, the state was in the service of the powerful. Ultimately, vanity and the will to power overcome the need for approval from all sectors of society; class approval is sufficient for the owners of private property. The citizen, Rousseau observes, works for the success of the group. One can appreciate here Marx’s affinity for Rousseau.38 Yet Rousseau refuses to leave it at that. There is an alternative to vanity and envy, and to group conflict and domination. He gives us an ideal social order and ideal individual but without a naïve optimism. The ideal society would be founded on the idea of the common good. In contrast to the will of the majority in the sense of interest-group politics, the general will represents a genuine concern for what is best for everyone in the community. When justice and a sense of the common good directs the actions of legislatures, then the “general will” of the people is expressed. Rousseau acknowledges that public opinion and politics do not always follow the general will in practice. If there is a single common good and if the people always will what is good for them, as Rousseau seems to indicate, then mistakes in the real world are due to a failure to understand what is in their common best interest. His explanation is thin at best, for his criticism of society and its institutions as wicked and humans (in the state of society) as vain and envious is hardly reconcilable with his concept of the general will that should be the basis of politics. Perhaps he is saying that the will to power clouds one’s understanding that life in a moral community brings greater happiness than wealth and power. But how are people moved to this insight? Rousseau categorically asserts the close relationship between morality and politics. To separate the two is to inadvertently create

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pervasive and enduring social conflict.39 As alternatives to the citizen in the state of society, Rousseau proposes two types of individual, the solitary individual and the moral individual. Once humans live in a state of society, they cannot return to the state of nature, for they have already been socialized. To live as a solitary individual is to give up on the human potential for moral freedom and love. When you refuse to treat others with dignity in a communal setting, Todorov observes, you unintentionally accept human inequality. Only morality can establish a true equality among humans. Once we have tasted of human society, its rejection is tantamount to selfishness and vanity.40 The ideal individual is the moral individual. Although the state of society is corrupting, it offers opportunity for correction. Rousseau suggests “domestic education” as a way of instructing the individual in virtue and freedom. Only in society do virtue and freedom become a possibility. Morality is necessary for human freedom, to resist the twin tyrannies of instinct and rational organization. But freedom and love are intimately connected: love of others is a check on freedom (preventing it from becoming the will to power) and only free people can love. It is here that Rousseau the pessimist finds a speck of hope. The only happiness possible in the state of society is the result of virtue universally applied. One can only be fully human in universal society.41

LOCKE AND ROUSSEAU

It is immediately obvious that Locke makes politics dependent upon economics, whereas Rousseau makes it dependent on morality. And both believed that the origin of political power was in the will of the people and that the origin was to be a limitation on this power. Before developing the differences in detail, let us first examine their common assumptions and beliefs. Both Locke and Rousseau, both liberalism, and humanism, and later utilitarianism, placed a greater emphasis on nature and reason than on God and faith. Many remained believers but God had become abstract; he was now the “Final Cause” or the Great Contriver.”42 After the epidemic of unbelief in the sixteenth century, God was restored but now as an impersonal god. Nature gradually lost its status as God’s creation maintained by His active presence

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and became autonomous. By the eighteenth century God’s will was better understood by scientific observation than by reading Scripture.43 As Carl Becker puts it, the humanists and liberals, among others, “deified nature and denatured God.”44 Reason, especially in the form of science, was more important than faith. Some humanists, for example, certain French philosophers, blamed faith as irrationality for the worst forms of human violence. Scientific reason was extended to the study of society. Adam Smith anticipated becoming the Isaac Newton of the social sciences.45 Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and most British political and economic philosophers made human nature and society the object of “scientific inquiry.” By contrast, the French humanists placed a greater emphasis on history and the discovery of “man in general.” The critical destruction between Locke and Rousseau and to some extent between liberalism and humanism centers on two issues—individualism and holism46 and the real versus the ideal. Locke and Smith as well begin with a view of human nature and from there construct a theory of society. For Locke, humans are rational hedonists who (with the introduction of money) “naturally” desire an unlimited amount of private property. The acquisition of private property confers differential rationality and rights and thus establishes social classes and a hierarchical social order. Adam Smith too begins with a theory of human nature, including the selfish passions or needs to trade goods and seek the approval of others. From this base, he establishes the economy and morality (moral sympathy for others) as social institutions. This psychological reductionism betrays a moral preference for the autonomous individual. Liberalism asserts the autonomy of the individual at the expense of the community. Locke and Smith compensate for this by building in a moral mechanism into the economic system. For Locke, property owners, who are more rational, will benefit nonproperty owners, who would squander their ownership. Smith believed that the “invisible hand of God” would direct the selfish activities of economic competitors to result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people, namely, the normal price (the lowest price a commodity can be sold and the producer still make a reasonable profit). Morality in each instance is moved from the individual to the economy. By contrast, Rousseau is holistic in approach. He views the individual as a creation of society (up to a point). For him the proper

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moral and social unit is the moral community. Freedom, virtue, and love can only be realized in unity with others. Politics should be an expression of the general will that desires the common good. A good social order will nourish moral individuals, just as a corrupt order will produce vain and envious individuals. The opposite is, of course, true: Moral individuals help create a moral community. Rousseau understood, as few have later, that there is no resolution to the tension between the individual and society. Rousseau’s pessimism is a recognition that the latter most often has greater influence over the former. We have already seen that Locke and other liberals built morality into the economic system and the human propensity to seek unlimited property. Locke confuses the real and ideal, as the history of capitalism has never stopped indicating. For Rousseau the ideal and the real are two distinct realms. Rousseau begins with reality as a way of seeking the moral. Locke and Smith confuse the two realms in the vain hope that the reality of capitalism will lead to the common good. Rousseau is immeasurably more realistic even if he does not successfully account for the movement from vanity to virtue. Humanism is related to modern republicanism in emphasizing the greater importance of the general will and common good. By contrast, liberalism is an advocate of the autonomous individual. British liberalism retained a stronger tie to Christianity; hence its view of human nature and society based on rational hedonism and self-interest was not a full alternative to the concept of original sin. French humanism, on the other hand, made a cleaner break with Christianity and thus offered a moral alternative to it. Both ideologies have played a part in the history of the past two centuries. John Locke’s thought has had the greatest influence on the idea of a liberal democracy based on capitalism. Rousseau’s views were used to justify both revolution and democratic rule as well as a moral critique of private property and inequality. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated, the abuses of industrialized capitalism in falsely turning land, labor, and money into commodities, almost always motivated some kind of reform.47 The legacy of humanism includes an emphasis on the moral organization of society as expressed in a unitary common good. As children of the Enlightenment, we vacillitate between the value of the autonomous individual and that of the community, between the economic and the moral. For the moment the devotees of global capitalism appear to have triumphed, but

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history confers no permanency on any ideology. If nothing else, Enlightenment thought moved freedom and equality to political and economic contexts. Even Rousseau’s effort to place politics on a moral foundation was quickly transformed by others into an advocacy of public opinion and majority rule without restriction. The Renaissance view of individual freedom had been superceded by the economic rise of the middle classes and their political ambitions.

FREEDOM AND EQUALITY IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Until recently, America was often looked to as a bastion of freedom and an advocate of equality. American revolutionaries looked to both Locke and Rousseau for inspiration. Locke’s influence was greater and more longlasting, however. I wish to examine how the ideological values of freedom and equality were changed to fit new circumstances in America. Because the details of American history are so well-known, my remarks will be exceedingly brief. The freedom of the individual declined significantly in the face of a series of related events: the rise of economic nationalism, slavery, the emergent power of corporations, and an obsession with national security. In the midst of the undeclared naval war with France in 1798, James Madison sadly commented: “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”48 George Washington, of course, had previously warned against the growing power of the federal government even when invoked to protect the nation’s interests. Thomas Jefferson, who was liberal in thought but conservative in practice, observed prior to his presidency “that a rich country can not long be a free one.”49 In the nineteenth century, Arthur Ekirch argues, political liberalism lost some of its original meaning as it merged with intellectual conservatism, which supported “religious orthodoxy, economic nationalism, and patrician control of thought.”50 Andrew Jackson helped to restore at least part of the liberal agenda in his attack upon the granting of state charters to private corporations by invoking the concept of the local community. It is reminiscent today of certain politicians supporting local communities that attempt to keep Wal-Mart out. Paradoxically, however, Jackson used the power of government to support the attack on

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monopoly and the conquest of the West under the slogan of Manifest Destiny in the decades leading up to the Civil War. True liberals are as horrified by big government as by big corporations.51 Slavery is obviously the inverse of freedom and one of the worst evils humans can impose on other humans. Tocqueville maintained that American slavery was the worst form the world had witnessed.52 Prior to the Civil War the Constitution had given slave owners the same rights offered any property owner. But slavery indirectly led to an erosion of freedom in that Segregationists and Abolitionists alike used propaganda, public opinion, and the force of government to impose their views on citizens.53 Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of civil rights during the Civil War supported national unity at the expense of individual freedom. Ironically, slavery was abolished by suspending individual freedom. This is obviously not a unique case: History affirms that the advancement of one value is often at the expense of another. Recall Tocqueville’s discussion in chapter 1 of the conflict between freedom and equality in American history. The extension of the Fourteenth Amendment, the due process clause, to corporations was a symbolic as well as a material victory for business. The corporation became a person and as such was entitled to certain rights (freedoms). For many, the success of corporations was essential to the goal of economic nationalism. As long as capitalism remained within national boundaries, it was more difficult to see the inherent conflict between the two. During the Progressive Period (1890–1910), social and political reformers demanded the extension of governmental regulations to business and industry. Exposés of the meatpacking industry (Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) and other consumer products were behind this movement. The adage “Let the consumer beware” was under attack. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 put business on notice that economic nationalism did not give it the right to ransack citizens.54 The increasing power of the nation-state sometimes favored big business, sometimes favored labor and citizen. From a liberal point of view, the evil was organization and the control and diminution of the individual. It mattered little whether the power was that of government or corporation. But liberalism had a second battle to fight—the tendency of the individual to identify with and seek fulfillment in the organization. Nationalism accomplishes this in two ways: (1) The individual becomes a part of the nation and acquires a

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super-identity at the same time the nation assumes an individual personality, whether fictional, as with “Uncle Sam,” or real as in the cult of the hero; (2) or the individual identifies with the corporation as a team, family, or community member to the point that individual success becomes collective success. Even the self-help success seminars began to reflect this redefinition of success in organizational terms in the early twentieth century.55 Freedom now resides in the nation-state and the corporation, the twin providers for and protectors of the individual. National security during the Cold War in particular completed the eclipse of individual freedom. Loyalty oaths, intolerance of dissent, increasing surveillance of citizens, and the never ending threat of war increased military and political power.56 As Erich Fromm remarked, the individual more often than not chooses security over freedom in a situation of authoritarian or totalitarian power.57 The principal cause of the decline of individual freedom has been the increase of power in organization—bureaucracy and technology as embedded in the nation-state and the corporation. In the subsequent chapter, I will describe how the power of technology (including bureaucracy) has supplanted political and economic power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Like freedom, equality is an existential concept that begins as a protest against one’s life circumstances. As indicated earlier, the concept changes its meaning according to historical circumstances. Most prominent in American history have been the following kinds of equality: equality before the law, political equality, equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, equality of esteem, and group (plural) equality. As J. R. Pole observes: “The language of equality was the only legitimizing language to take the place of the discarded language of divine right monarchy and paternal or hereditary authority.”58 The language of equality was like all natural languages polysemic. “Due process of law” was articulated in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. Equality before the law, at first narrowly defined, meant that class and privilege were not to determine the outcome of a court decision.59 Later the Courts would make use of this concept to intervene in politics, for example, segregation. Political equality, the equality of individuals to vote and hold office, was implicit in the Constitution. Some national leaders such as Alexander Hamilton were fearful of majority rule, but because property

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owners were concentrated in areas of greatest population density, others concluded that there was little to fear from political equality. Consequently, equality was now a prominent aspect of justice.60 Critics like James Madison in 1787, however, warned that serious inequality of outcome, inequality of property and money, would lead to social conflict and personal anxiety. Pole argues that Madison believed that there were no extant social institutions that would bring inequality of abilities and equality of rights closer together.61 Such institutions might include education and voluntary associations as well as an activist legislature. Equality of outcome, however, would have to wait until the early twentieth century and especially the 1960s to make great advances in public opinion. Equality of esteem predated the American Revolution and indeed was a rallying cry for it. The colonists resented the lack of respect shown to them by their absentee landowners in England. Their resentment against “taxation without representation” was a symbol of a more general frustration. Equality of esteem resurfaces at many times in American history in the forms of Populism, including rural resentment of urban domination in the Northeast. It is especially important in considering slavery, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. Pole maintains that the lack of respect was the most injurious deprivation black Americans faced.62 There are two reasons, I think, for making this assertion. First, esteem or respect becomes materialized: It is difficult to respect someone who is economically and politically inferior. Second, the lack of esteem can be internalized by the individual and group so denied. James Baldwin’s writings, among others, called attention to this during the Civil Rights Movement. Andrew Jackson’s campaign for president brought equality of opportunity greater public attention than it had ever had. By the middle of the nineteenth century, equality of opportunity was used ideologically to bring together the American goals of individual success and national advancement. Clearly, many perceived that equality of opportunity was in the nation’s interest. By the early twentieth century equality of opportunity had become the cornerstone of equality.63 In the Civil Rights Movement, equality of opportunity and equality of esteem became almost interchangeable and were related to political equality. The Supreme Court, Pole maintains, made equality the Constitution’s paramount value.64 Equality of esteem also became a group concept. Some argued that individual esteem would never improve until group esteem

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was established.65 The proliferation of great blocs of immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century led many politicians to begin to think in terms of group or ethnic identity. Americans, too, stereotyped individuals by their ethnic or racial group.66 Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome were redefined in terms of the group, eventually including women. Plural equality superceded individual equality in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Affirmative action programs illustrate the dilemma: Is equality of opportunity an individual or a group concept, or both? Pole concludes that the idea of individual equality was eroded by more than ethnic pluralism, however. Business consolidation, the rise of corporations, nationalism, industrialization, and consumerism created standardization and uniformity that conflicted with earlier ideas of equality.67 Equality that was a consequence of abstract organization—bureaucracy and technology—is hardly compatible with an equality that is related to individual freedom. In the following chapter, we will examine how the rise of a technological civilization has led to radically different definitions of freedom and equality.

CHAPTER 3

5 Freedom and Equality as the Modern Ideology In Enlightenment thought and American history, freedom and equality have had various political and economic meanings related to the individual. The context within which the values of freedom and equality are articulated today is radically different. This new context is primarily technological and only secondarily political and economic; moreover, it is highly collectivistic while retaining an individualistic appearance. The current ideology of freedom and equality is a justification of this technological context. Strictly speaking, the ideology of freedom and equality is a foundational ideology, that is, the basis of all nationalistic ideologies and transnational ideologies such as capitalism and socialism. Furthermore, as I will argue in chapter 5, the ideology of freedom and equality is the link between nationalistic ideologies and the myth of technological utopianism.

A TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

I am following French historian and sociologist Jacques Ellul, who defines technology as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”1 One of Ellul’s critical insights is that technology involves more than material technology (such as machines); it includes nonmaterial techniques, which are either organizational or psychological, or both. Bureaucracy is an example of the former, whereas advertising and public relations are examples of the latter. 29

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Technology increasingly dominates every form of human activity. In the West, technological innovations were integrated into the extant culture until the nineteenth century; that is, such innovations were situated in aesthetical, ethical, and religious relationships with other cultural artifacts and means of acting upon nature. Moreover, there were numerous limitations placed on the use of technology, both within and between societies. First, technology was applied only in certain, specific areas, such as production, hunting, and war. Second, the power of the technical means employed was limited in favor of the skill of the artisan and worker. The method was variable and adapted to the individual. Then, too, techniques continued to be used as long as they were effective; there was no insatiable desire for ever greater efficiency. Therefore, technology was not readily discarded because it had become obsolete. Third, technology was local for the most part; it did not readily cross cultural boundaries. Fourth, there was a choice about whether to use technology or not. This is crucial. Because technology was so limited in its efficacy and because it was not the most important phenomenon in society, individuals were often free to choose among various methods, and to choose whether to use a technique at all. Today, there is less choice. One pays a heavy price for not using technology, if only in terms of public opinion. In addition, there is a strong tendency in a technological civilization to employ the single most efficient method when it is discovered.2 The upshot of this is that prior to the nineteenth century technology was simply one aspect of a culture. This began to change when scientific and technological advances, and the concomitant “myth of progress,” swept across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. Science and technology were inexorably linked; indeed, technology as applied science became the justification for science. The incredible efflorescence of technological inventions bedazzled leaders and followers alike; consequently, technology became an end in itself, the purpose of civilization. As an end in itself, technology is simultaneously the most powerful means employed in the service of efficacy and efficiency. This desire to push technology as fast and as far as it will go demonstrates that technology, while a rational construction, is ultimately driven by the irrational will to power, the will to control, dominate, and exploit. Its material development was accompanied by its spiritualization. Technology was made sacred, that which is tacitly perceived to be of absolute

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power and absolute value.3 The domination was now complete: technology was an uncontested material and spiritual power. To appreciate the uniqueness of a technological civilization, we must consider technology as both milieu and system. A milieu is an environment, at once both material and symbolic, in relation to which humans face their most formidable problems and from which they derive the means of survival and some hope for the future. A milieu has three basic characteristics: immediacy, sustenance and peril, and mediation. We are in immediate and direct relationship with our milieu; it forces us to adapt, to conform, just as surely as we manipulate it. From the milieu we derive all that we need to live— sustenance for the body and the spirit: food, clothing, shelter, order, and meaning. Concurrently, however, the milieu presents the greatest threat to human existence, as in pestilence, famine, poisons, wild animals, political strife, war, and pollution. The milieu, then, is ambiguous in value and produces an ambivalent reaction on our part—attraction and revulsion, desire and fear. In Ellul’s theory,4 humans have inhabited three milieus—nature, society, and technology. Humans began the slow transition from the milieu of nature to the milieu of society nine to eleven thousand years ago, depending upon the specific geographical location. The milieu of society arose with the emergence of the city and the rise of civilizations at least six thousand years ago. The movement to the milieu of technology occurred in the nineteenth century and became more fully established with the widespread use of the computer in the twentieth century. Ellul’s theory is no finalist theory in which the last stage represents the culmination of history; moreover, there is no deterministic principle underlying the process. Various societies can be in different stages in any historical period. Furthermore, there is no sense of progress: Each milieu involves both gain and loss. Each subsequent milieu (for instance, society in relation to nature) mediates the preceding one, rendering it an indirect force. The preceding milieu becomes an ideological model for the subsequent milieu, thereby providing an illusion of where power resides. In dialectical fashion, however, it is actually the subsequent milieu that is used to interpret its predecessor. In the milieu of society, for example, nature is actually read through society, that is, it is anthropomorphized. Therefore, nature as a model for society, as with natural law theory, is, to a great extent, a nature that is already a reflection of

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society. Similarly, society serves as a model in the milieu of technology, but it is a society controlled by a technological logic and thereby rendered increasingly technological. Each preceding milieu continues to exert an influence on the subsequent one, but the threat that it represents tends to become less important overall. In the milieu of nature, the major problems were wild animals, poisons, and so forth; in the milieu of society the greatest threats are moral, political, and military conflicts; in the milieu of technology, the principal obstacles to survival are posed by technology itself, as with pollution and stress. Not only does the subsequent milieu mediate the previous milieu, but it sometimes exacerbates the tensions and conflicts of the preceding one. For example, in the milieu of technology, political and economic problems are sometimes aggravated, as witnessed by increasing ethnic, racial, and nationalistic strife. The most telling characteristic of technology as a milieu is that it functions as a kind of system.5 Technology becomes a system because we have looked for multiple uses of the same technology, for example, laser technology, and have attempted to coordinate disparate technologies in the interest of efficiency. Technology is an open system in that it interacts with its two environments—nature and human society—but it is not open in that it does not possess genuine feedback. What finally allows technology to become an open system is the widespread use of the computer. The computer allows each technique to become a source of information for the coordination of the various technologies. Technology is a system, then, at the level of information. This means, however, that each subsystem loses some of its flexibility, for its courses of action must be adjusted to the needs of the other subsystems. The mutual interaction and mutual dependency of subsystems made possible by the computer is the technological system. In large urban areas the various technological subsystems such as communication, transportation, law enforcement, and commerce become more dependent upon one another for the smooth operation of the overall urban system. Although the technological system is an open system, it is more or less autonomous in relation to its human environment. The problem is that the technological system allows for no effective feedback, that is, self-regulation. Feedback means that a system (for instance, an ecological system) has the ability to correct the problem at its source. For example, if the technological system possessed feedback, then the use of the automobile, a major cause of air pollution,

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would be eliminated or severely curtailed. Instead, we attempt to discover ways of countering the negative effects of the automobile on the environment. We attempt to correct the problem after the fact so that we can have it both ways—drive our cars as much as we like and have a clean environment. Only humans, however, can provide feedback for the technological system. But because of our supreme faith in technology and because of our belief that technology itself can solve all problems, we do not perceive the need to provide such feedback. Even if we attempt to use the computer as a feedback mechanism, it can only handle quantitative data. Hence, the computer rules out the possibility of evaluating the impact of technology upon the qualitative side of life: How does technology affect culture and the human psyche? The ability of technology to create an efficient order at the societal level is offset by its disordering impact upon culture and personality. The computer, however, is constitutionally unable to make such an historical and cultural interpretation. Technology’s near-total domination (it affects us more than we affect it) is exemplified by the fact today everything tends to be an imitation of technology and/or a compensation for its impact.6 Imitation of technology is nowhere more evident than in the glut of “how to” books and techniques for relating to others. How to raise children, how to climb the ladder of success, how to manipulate one’s boss, how to be popular, how to be happy—the list is unending. I have studied such imitation technologies in my book Technology as Magic.7 They can be grouped into two categories, psychological and managerial (organizational) techniques. These are precisely the nonmaterial technology that Ellul’s definition of technology included. I have demonstrated that these techniques, which are rapidly proliferating, function as magical practices according to the placebo principle or that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet we can’t help reducing everything to a technique, for technology deconstructs and supplants a common culture including common sense. As a consequence, almost everything today has to be learned as a technique.8 This is the paramount reason schools are forced to teach “life skills.” Everything from babysitting to getting along with one’s peers has to be learned as a formalized (technical) skill. Technology creates the need for compensatory mechanisms in large part because of its impact upon cultural meaning and the individual.9 In traditional societies, practical knowledge was embedded

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in social institutions, which together formed the basis of a culture. Institutions contained what have been termed “symbolically mediated experiences.” Technology supplants experience and deconstructs common meaning. Cultural meaning, whether ethical or aesthetical, is now fragmented. This creates a desperate search for meaning, as with the proliferation of new religious groups and cults, or with the multiplication of business ethics, medical ethics, and so forth. Moreover, because there is an inverse relationship between power and values, technology, which today is exclusively about power—efficiency and efficacy—turns power itself into a value. Technology permits morality only insofar as it is reduced to ideology.10 Technology affects the individual both as recipient and user. Technology applied to an individual reduces her to an abstraction, the uniform object. If I apply a child-raising technique to all five children, each child’s individuality is denied. As a user of technique, I do not depend on my experience and reflection; instead I merely apply a formal and abstract technique. Technology radically diminishes individuality. Added to this is the tempo of life in a technological society. The faster the pace of living the more we experience the impulse to flee a reality of seemingly unlimited demands.11 Consequently, individuals experience the desire to express themselves, even lose themselves, in compensatory activities, such as video games, television, movies, the Internet, and sports. One of Ellul’s12 most profound insights is that technology is concurrently the chief organizing force in modern society and its fundamental disorganizing force. Technology supplants institutions and morality; or in Arnold Gehlen’s words, “the place of institutions is taken by organizations.”13 At the same time, however, it leads to cultural and psychological fragmentation. We look to technology to repair the damage done to environment, culture, and psyche. The technological system, Ellul explains, creates and elaborates means of facilitation, adjustment, and compensation. Clearly humans make efforts to repair the damage technology does to the environment, for example, reduce the release of greenhouse gases. Less obvious are the varied attempts to help humans adjust to the demands of technology. The mental health industry, including selfhelp groups, and the pharmaceutical industry play a key role here. As part of an overall adjustment, technology provides a plethora of compensations: mass media entertainment and consumerism of every sort. Consumerism and entertainment are our compensations

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for the increasing control technology exercises over us. The only important conformity today is conformity to technology. This is why the technological system can tolerate diverse lifestyles, moralities, cults, and other cultural expressions—they do not threaten the advancement of the system.14 The decline of a common morality, however, exacerbates the tensions between groups, creating a fully politicized environment. Each group becomes a special interest group in competition with other groups for resources and access to services. Senior citizens fight to protect their “rights” over against those younger. It likewise results in vague, insincere, and dangerous relationships between individuals. The basis of trust in a community is a common morality; one assumes most people most of the time behave in a civil way. When morality erodes or becomes fragmented, mistrust replaces trust. Paradoxically, the more our individual relationships become competitive, the more we seek protection in groups.15 Extreme individualism, as Kierkegaard and Tocqueville observed in the nineteenth century, coexists with and requires the ascendancy of the group and public opinion over the individual. Special interest groups indirectly do the bidding of the technological system by integrating individuals into the group, which sets the political goal of increased resources and power. Yet the technological system is out of control despite all the efforts at repair, facilitation, adjustment, and compensation. For it lacks true feedback. At most we can reject those technological choices that are obviously too risky economically, but we continue to wager our future on technological progress that makes life more dangerous and unpredictable. Some readers are by now wondering why nothing has been said about global capitalism. Is not modern technology a by-product of capitalism? Although a full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this book, a few comments are in order. Noneconomic technology develops concomitantly with industrial technology, and in certain instances predates it. Karl Polanyi mentions Jeremy Bentham’s attempt to create a science of legislation and morality, including the Panopticon and “crime tariffs.”16 Bertrand de Jouvenel17 demonstrates the growth of state power in the West over the past 500 years, a key feature of which is administrative technique. For political purposes, then, nonmaterial technology became highly developed even prior to the Industrial Revolution.

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During the Cold War, the Soviet Union pushed technology— communication, transportation, and especially military—even though it was not a capitalist society. Moreover, all states, socialist, Communist, and capitalist are devoted to the advance of technology and related consumerism. Capitalism, as Weber18 understood, is a type of economic technique. All technology is first and foremost about the will to power. Political, military, religious, and social technology cannot be reduced to economic power. Humans have motives other than profit. Louis Dumont19 has demonstrated that the modern tendency to reduce all issues to economic ones is part of what he terms “economic ideology.” Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx subscribed to it; we are their stepchildren. Global capitalism is the way the technological system is becoming universal. At the same time, however, politics appears to be more important than technology in understanding the conflicts and divisions within modern society. There is no attempt here to deny the politicization of all issues in the technological society, but rather to discover what drives politics at a deeper level. First, the domination of technology has made power abstract. The power of judgment and decision is not vested in individual managers, experts, and politicians but in the system as a whole. Weber understood this about bureaucracy: specialization is coordinated in a logical system of rules so that power resides in bureaucracy as a system. Ellul extended this idea to technology as a whole, the technological system. Furthermore, human judgment and political decision are in the service of advancing technological growth and efficiency. As a result, human control of technology is at most the power to veto certain technological innovations that are obviously too expensive or unnecessary. But this occurs rarely, as the history of military technology indicates.20 Power is now centered in the technological system. Political power has become the use of technology to advance the interests of one’s group, class, or nation, yet always resulting in the continued development of the technological system. Second, organizational technique (bureaucracy) permeates politics; it is the basis of the modern state and political parties. Bureaucracy is hierarchical and controls the flow of information. As countless critics have observed, bureaucracy and democracy are fundamentally opposed.21

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Third, the media have transformed politics. Political discourse is totally manipulative and increasingly employs the psychological techniques of advertising and public relations. Propaganda, advertising, and public relations clearly run counter to the ideal of free and transparent discourse central to the democratic ideal. The ideology of freedom and equality is articulated through advertising, public relations, and political propaganda. In fact one can regard all three as forms of propaganda. The former two, advertising and public relations, are what Ellul calls “sociological propaganda.” Sociological propaganda is in part spontaneous, it is the “penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context.”22 It is about lifestyle objectives, rather than political goals. As politics is reduced to the advocacy of increased consumption, political and sociological propaganda merge. Because technology destroys the moral unity of modern society, the political conflict over the ”spoils” of technology increases. Every group becomes a special interest group. A technological society is simultaneously a completely politicized society whose discourse is propaganda. Propaganda in all its manifestations is the most important nonmaterial technology today; in its role as an ersatz culture, it is responsible for our conformity to the demands of the technological system.

FREEDOM AS CONSUMER CHOICE AND ABUNDANCE

This is undoubtedly the primary meaning of freedom today. Consumer choice is an aesthetical view of freedom: we are free to choose those goods and services that bring us the greatest pleasure. Choice, however, is meaningless without abundance. A brief history of consumerism and abundance will serve as a backdrop for our analysis. By the turn of the nineteenth century, England had become the first consumer society.23 The Industrial Revolution and the consumer revolution went hand in hand. The latter could only have occurred by transforming the spiritual happiness of the early eighteenth century into the material happiness of the nineteenth century. Or more precisely by making the spiritual dependent on the material. Consumption obviously refers to more than the consumption of necessities for survival; it points as well to luxuries

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and to improved, stylized, and novel necessities with the result that the distinction between necessity and luxury, need and desire, become blurred. Mass production not only filled the void of the individual family’s inability to be self-sufficient, but also created cheaper and better made products in certain instances. Of greater importance, increasing over time, was the stimulation of desire.24 Social emulation of the nobility by the middle class and of the middle class by the working class was made possible through mass production and consumption. One could now buy the appearance of higher status and greater respectability. The desire to be happy, to make the magical powers of the product one’s own, even more than emulation, was being unleashed. To tap the hidden recesses of consumer desire, merchants had to “sell consumption.”25 The display of goods had a rhetoric of its own, an advertisement for consumption.26 Before the advertising industry became a giant, the world of goods had to be put on display, especially in major cities. The venues included expositions, fairs, and large department stores in particular. The uniquely American contribution to consumption was the mail-order catalogue. This proved a boon to the farmer and other rural dwellers. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company were the largest and among the earliest mail-order companies. Between the early 1880s and the early twentieth century the size of each company’s circulation grew prodigiously, for example, Sears’s circulation went from just over 300,000 in 1897 to over 3 million in 1907.27 The mail-order catalogue became known affectionately as the “Farmer’s Bible.” This secular bible promised a different kind of joy—the happiness of consumption. Daniel Boorstin describes its religious significance: It was not merely facetious to say that many farmers came to live more intimately with the good Big Book of Ward’s or Sears, Roebuck than with the Good Book. The farmer kept his Bible in the frigid parlor, but as Edna Ferber remarked in Fanny Herself (1917), her novel of the mail-order business, the mail-order catalogue was kept in the cozy kitchen. That was where the farm family ate and where they really lived. For many such families the catalogue probably expressed their most vivid hopes for salvation.28

A full-blown consumer society, then, is one in which increased consumption is both the paramount social goal and the source of

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identity for the individual.29 Ultimately, it turns everything, including people, into objects of consumption. Over 50 years ago David Riesman observed that the product most in demand in business today is the personality.30 But this holds for leisure activities as well. In respect to the peer group, Riesman observed: Over and beyond the socialization of consumption preferences and the exchange of consumption shoptalk by this consumers’ union, the membership is engaged in consuming itself. That is, people and friendships are viewed as the greatest of all consumables; the peer-group is itself a main object of consumption, its own main competition in taste.31

Daniel Boorstin maintains both that advertising is the American folk or popular culture and its most pervasive and influential form of literature.32 I have demonstrated how the various television programs embody advertising symbolism.33 The programs are advertisements for advertising. As the wellspring of culture, advertising provides the rhetoric of choice and a display of abundance. Stuart Ewen’s research on advertising indicates that freedom is portrayed as choice or as abundance.34 Of course, choice and abundance become one as each implies the other. A 1948 ad for Sun Oil Company announces, “There is only one freedom, Freedom of Choice.”35 A Wendy’s commercial of the 1980s dramatically portrays this idea. A small group of Russians sit watching a fashion show in which a stout woman stylelessly attired in a gray, formless smock wears the same garment to demonstrate the latest in day-wear, beachwear, and night-wear. Abruptly the scene shifts to the United States where freedom is shown to be choosing among all the toppings what to put on your burger. Research on advertising formats helps to identify the various dimensions of choice.36 The first format, that of product information, is the oldest and most straightforward. It simply describes the product, gives its price, and sometimes makes “scientific” claims about it. The following three formats, increasingly used after 1925, are all symbolic: they associate the product or service with power and meaning. It is in this sense that advertising sells symbols. The second format, product image, places the product in a natural or human context so that the product assumes the properties of the context. A quick example is an SUV on top of a mountain. The emphasis here is on making the product come alive, imbuing it with

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power. Orlando Patterson recently discovered that the “most frequently mentioned experience of freedom among modern Americans is that of moving about.”37 This includes, of course, travel and tourism, but at the center of this experience is the automobile, truck, or motorcycle. The automobile represents the power of mobility. The third format, “personalized” product, suggests the product can transform your self and your life—happier, admired, successful. Automobile ads often feature a new car owner who is envied by neighbors. More importantly, the product can help you create a self, an eternally new self. Colin Campbell ties the ethic of consumption to the Romantic definition of the self as infinite possibility: the unending search for new and intense experience. Campbell maintains, “It would be just as true to say that the self is built through consumption as that consumption expresses the self.” The self becomes a work of collage, a loose collection of what it consumes.38 The fourth format, the lifestyle format, associates the product or service with a lifestyle one would like to assume. A Lincoln Continental features a well-dressed, attractive, upper-middle class couple getting out of their car to enter an expensive hotel. Or Keystone beer is being drunk by college students having a good time. The second, third, and fourth formats, all symbolic, are concerned respectively with power, identity and self-transformation, and lifestyle. They are clearly interrelated. Identity is to lifestyle as attitude is to behavior. And what makes possible a change in identity or lifestyle is the power of the commodity: I acquire the power of what I consume, perhaps even I become what I consume. The various symbolisms of advertising share a common theme: the product or service increases freedom. By choosing (the exercise of freedom) a particular product one enhances one’s freedom. Or, in other words, I am free to choose freedom as reified in consumption. David Potter argues that America has symbolized abundance since the nineteenth century.39 Initially it was about seemingly unlimited natural resources and their implications for economic abundance; later it was about technology as well.40 The twin sources of abundance were natural resources and technology. The latter was equated with democracy. In 1812, Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Cooper maintained that useful science such as that practiced by Benjamin Franklin performed a democratic service by improving the material existence of the common man. Jefferson realized that technology could not be hoarded by the wealthy even if

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they so desired, but instead would be made available to virtually every class.41 Technology was the great equalizer. The content of American nationalism as a collective identity has been democracy and technology, each of which was defined in terms of the other. Americans possessed a missionary zeal for both. By mid-nineteenth century, as Leo Marx remarks, “The image of the American machine has become a transcendent symbol: a physical object invested with political and metaphysical ideality. It rolls across Europe and Asia, liberating the oppressed people of the Old World—a signal, in fact, for the salvation of mankind.”42 For the individual the promise of technology is increased consumption. In his analysis of the narratives of American advertising in the 1920s and 1930s, Roland Marchand concludes, “The cumulative, crowning parable of advertising amplified the American Dream by proclaiming, ‘you can have it all.’ ”43 The American Dream became the supreme American export. Abundance, desire, and consumer choice were inexorably linked. As Guy Debord observes, the desire is for the “promised land of total consumption.”44 I have referred to this elsewhere as the myth of technological utopianism.45 One dimension of this myth is the belief that perfect health and happiness, or eternal youth, can be realized through consumption. (This myth is further explored in chapter 5.)

FREEDOM AS INDIVIDUAL RIGHT

Individual, group, natural, civil, and human rights appear to have as much or more to do with equality as with freedom. Indeed this is so. The idea of right is the place where freedom and equality are wedded. Both have to do with the dignity of the individual. Yet I think that right has somewhat more to do with freedom for two reasons. First, the modern idea of right derives from the liberalism of the Enlightenment, in which liberty (freedom) was the principal value. The major concern was the political liberty of property owners. Second, only the idea of human rights extends the concept to everyone. Group rights by definition are usually applied exclusively to a disadvantaged group. A right is a freedom and it becomes an equal right when universally applied. From the eighteenth century to the present, there has been an increase in the proliferation of rights and a demand for their realization.

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Carl Becker notes, however, that a backlash against natural rights occurred in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Perhaps the antipathy was most directed against the right of revolution, which was articulated specifically in the American Declaration of Independence. By the second half of the nineteenth century the enthusiasm for natural rights was being restored under the rubric of human rights.46 The twentieth century witnessed an amazing proliferation of rights in the face of and perhaps as compensation for its atrocities. Zbigniew Brzezinski notes that “no less than 167,000,000 lives—and quite probably in excess of 175,000,000—were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnage.”47 This total exceeds the sum of all previous military and religious conflicts known to human history. The concept of right is relative to culture and history.48 Only at a high level of abstraction can the various conceptions be seen to be similar if not identical. The debate over the universality of the content of rights is similar to the debate over natural law. Is there a universal law? Is there a universal right? My position is that all meaning is culturally and historically embedded. Yet from the eighteenth century to the present the concept of right has become more homogeneous. There are a number of reasons for this convergence of understanding. The Western idea of human right was universal in theory if not in practice. Although it was never applied to all humans (slaves, women, minorities, workers, non-property holders), the concept of human rights should be applied to all humans. John Searle calls it a “status function.”49 By this he means that in proclaiming something to be a human right we are insisting that the status of being human necessarily implies certain functions, among which are rights. For example, the right to free speech is a function of being and acting as a human. Prior to this, a right was applied only to a specific status, for example, the rights of the aristocracy against the king.50 The upshot of this is that articulation of a human right in the Enlightenment provided the theoretical basis for attacking its unequal application. How long was it possible for human rights to refer exclusively to men with property? The idea of a universal human right is widely accepted. As Lawrence Friedman observes, “Even the worst dictators pay lip service to them [human rights].”51 This globalization of human rights has reached the point that both defenders and critics of the West employ the concept of right. Some Westerners, for example, attack the Muslim practice of veiling women as a human rights violation; at the same

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time, however, Muslims in Europe define veiling as a right of religious expression. Yasemin Soysal notes that Muslim immigrants most often defend their religious and cultural practices in terms of the modern or Western concept of right.52 Like Samuel Huntington, some have argued the current idea of right is modern not Western, thereby drawing a sharp distinction between the two. The issue is whether the West as the origin of modern science and technology, democracy, and capitalism is responsible, or the latter (science, technology, democracy, and capitalism) independent of their origin. As Friedman observes, “it does not matter whether technology made the West, or the West in some subtle way made technology happen.”53 I concur. The universality of human rights is furthered of course by the Internet. Jeremy Rifkin describes how Internet users all over the world define freedom as the “right to be included in webs of mutual relationships.”54 This suggests there should be no barriers to information, goods, and services. Friedman raises the possibility that the full spectrum of human rights is almost a kind of religion, a world religion at that.55 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 is perhaps the document closest to a world religion. It includes among other rights: freedom from hunger, freedom to work, freedom of movement, protection against torture, protection against slavery, freedom of self-determination, freedom of assembly, equal rights of men and women in marriage, the right to an education, and the right to life.56 The moral, political, economic, and cultural complications of implementing these rights are innumerable. Consequently, both national and international law are looked to for a solution. Human rights are both cause and effect of what Friedman calls a “legal culture.”57 Freedoms and rights are institutionalized in legal processes and institutions, such as contracts, litigation, entitlements, constitutions, welfare, and judicial review. The “legalization” of life is evidenced by the extension of liability to organizations, the use of due process in public organizations, and the prevalent idea that no issue or action is outside the purview of law. Modern law has supplanted traditional forms of authority, he argues.58 This is in keeping with Max Weber’s ideas about rational/legal authority in the modern world. The proliferation of law and the resulting density of law means that increasingly nothing is immune from legal control. In the United States, for example, federal administrative agencies

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yearly produced more than 50,000 pages (quite probably now over 100,000 pages) of regulations twenty years ago. Congress gives birth annually to over 1,000 pages of public laws.59 The idea of right has been variously connected with the notions of duty, responsibility, need, and choice. In traditional legal theory, the idea of right was seen as the flip side of duty.60 One person’s right meant that someone or some group had a duty to actualize that right. In the Middle Ages, for instance, peasant farmers had the right to a livelihood, and the landowners had a duty to insure this, especially in times of natural disaster. The idea of right also implies the responsibility of the right holder. In the previous example, the peasant farmer had a duty to farm responsibly and to live frugally. A bone of contention is whether a right should be stripped from those who live irresponsibly. Should welfare be denied to those who spend their check on liquor? Much of modern law is devoted to conflicts between rights and duties. To a great extent, Friedman argues, “Modern law is a system of rights and entitlements.”61 This obviously is a key factor in the proliferation of law. Rights and entitlements today suggest needs. We tend to perceive people as a collection of needs.62 The concept of need, however, is culturally and historically relative. The concept of need has expanded in consumer societies, and is now related to choice and desire. It is precisely here that freedom as consumer choice and freedom as individual right merge. Friedman observes that the traditional meaning of right has been significantly changed so that it now refers to “personal choice and private life,” which enable us to create “zones of freedom and realms of open options.”63 He terms individual choice the “core notion” of legal culture.64 Mobility is an apt example. Perhaps more than any other people Americans desire mobility to go places, do things, change occupations, change religion, change social class. These choices mean little if they are not backed by rights or entitlements, whether explicit or implicit. During the Middle Ages, for instance, your choice of occupation was constrained by your father’s occupation and social class. At the same time, however, rights are abstract without choices. If right implies choice, choice suggests desire. Indeed right as an expansionistic concept is a metaphor for desire. Milan Kundera has understood this perfectly:

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I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day “the fight for human rights” or “violation of human rights.” But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.65

Rights easily become the desires that advertising presents to us as needs, the fulfillment of which is left open to our choices.

FREEDOM AS TECHNOLOGICAL POSSIBILITY

Every real possibility today is a technological one; it is the universal power and the universal panacea.66 Every aspect of life has come under the sway of technology. Historically, as we have seen previously, technology was confined to certain areas of our relationship to nature and even here it was highly restricted. The use of technology to control humans was unknown. All this has changed. Now virtually all human relationships are mediated by technology. Anonymous communication in the media, especially as entertainment, advertising, and public relations, supplants much of the interpersonal communication in families, neighborhoods, and communities. Bureaucratic relationships predominate in corporations and public organizations. Perhaps most telling is the incredible proliferation of psychological techniques to manipulate others. Whether these technologies work or not is less important than the very attempt to subject all human relationships to technology. Religion and sexuality were traditionally areas of human existence that were taboo, free of technical intervention.67 Technology has now invaded religion. Many churches use marketing techniques and advertising to attract members. Church services, whether or not they are televised, compete in the entertainment arena with increased use of visual technologies and electronic music.68 Seminaries teach courses on church management, how to reach different age segments of the congregation, and how to deliver a “captivating” homily. Most telling, however, is the transformation of religion into a psychological technique. As Will Herberg noted over 50 years ago,

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“peace of mind” is what most Americans expect from religion.69 Religion should bring happiness, health, and even success. From the late nineteenth century onward, religion has dabbled in the “positive thinking” movement. Positive thinking is a self-help movement in which the mind controls the body and the external world by thinking the right thoughts and setting the correct goals for oneself. It is a form of self-transformation, a kind of magic.70 Most recent examples include media reports on how prayer and spirituality can make one mentally and physically healthy. It is a way of turning religion into a means to achieve personal ends. The technological transformation of sexuality is well advanced. We have both “hardware” and “software” of sexual technology. The former refers to the sexual gadgets and machines, whereas the latter entails the sex manuals about how to increase the number or intensity of orgasms. Sex education is also part of the technologization of sex. This education takes sex out of a moral context and places it in a scientific and technological context. The issue is the physical and mental health of the young person. What are the physical, emotional, educational, occupational, and social consequences of engaging in unprotected sex? A scientific, technological approach to sex makes it a normal activity governed by concerns of efficiency. A final example of the universality of technology is the medicalization of deviance. This involves conceptualizing immoral behavior as an illness, physical or mental, or treating it with pharmaceuticals. Increasing numbers of behaviors, previously regarded as bad manners or immoral acts, are now handled by the medical profession and its allies. Hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, once considered learning disorders that teachers could help alleviate, are now regarded as diseases to be treated with drugs. The medicalization of deviance denies both the freedom and the responsibility of the actor. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange demonstrates this perfectly. In the novel, Alex, a violent street punk, is sent to prison for some of his crimes. While there he “volunteers” to take part in “Ludivico’s Treatment” in which he is conditioned so that he is unable to become violent without becoming seriously nauseated. In effect Alex cannot commit violent crimes anymore. In one scene, a dialogue between Alex and a sottish prison chaplain, the question is raised whether God wants us to be good or to choose to be good, and whether it is preferable to choose to do evil than be forced to do good. Goodness at the expense of freedom. Because some forms of

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deviance make a society inefficient (evil), there is pressure to eliminate or control them by whatever means necessary. If technology is becoming universal, what motivates citizens to accept its regimen? First, we have come to accept the power of technology as enhancing human freedom. In this view technology is our servant, for example, robots. Technology allows us to master time and space by shrinking them. Perhaps nothing is more associated with technology’s power than speed: the speed of the computer, the speed of the airplane, the speed of the automobile. Second, the power of technology to create human freedom is experienced most directly in the range of consumer choices. The automobile, for instance, allows us an unlimited number of places to visit, take a vacation, or have a road trip. The SUV combines in one vehicle power, speed, and mobility on and off the road; it is the embodiment of freedom. The Shopping Channel and Internet create a seemingly endless shopping mall at my command. I can shop for information, goods, and services anywhere and anytime. Ellul observes that just as advertising creates desire, public opinion in turn demands the satisfaction of desires and needs in technical innovations.71 The new is always better! How could we fail to connect technological possibility to human freedom? Freedom is consumer choice, right, and technological possibility. Each implies the other. The idea of right is central to the modern experience of freedom because it expands the expectations of citizens that technology will provide them with a multitude of choices and abundance.

PLURAL EQUALITY

Equality, J. R. Pole contends, is a metaphor for protesting social conditions. This became clear with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Movement in the 1960s in America. There was a decided emphasis here on what he terms equality of results.72 The various group protests in modern society are part of a pluralism that has its origins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pluralism as group identity and group power has superceded individual equality. J. H. van den Berg has examined the emergence of pluralism in Western Europe beginning in the late eighteenth century.73 Pluralism

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refers to the disintegration of a unified social structure, that is, the erosion of the boundaries between social groups, both vertical and horizontal. In traditional societies everyone had an ascribed status of age, sex, family, clan, and occupation. Moreover, all knew what prescribed relationship existed between their group and another (e.g., between men and women, between the old and the young, between hunters and farmers). In short, a unified social structure divides society into distinct groups only to reunite them through a set of complementary responsibilities and obligations. This is what Louis Dumont terms “hierarchy.”74 Even though some groups have higher status and more power than others, a sense of community limits the power any group exercises over the others. The idea that it takes both young and old to make up a community overrides the difference in status and power between old and young. When it works well then, hierarchy is dependent upon holism (the entire community). Furthermore, the different groups have complementary relationships to each other so that it takes men and women together, for instance, to make a complete human being and community. When the clear division between group and statuses becomes vague, pluralism ensues. Society becomes a loose collection of groups that have no established relationship to one another and little interaction.75 The relationship between individuals becomes vague as well. The individual only possesses a unified self when her relationship to others is clearly demarcated. The unity of the individual is coterminous with the unity of the community. As we have seen, unity implies differentiation; it likewise suggests complementarity. For example, the group of men and the group of women exist in a complementary relationship to each other. Although one has a variety of statuses and groups based on age, sex, and occupation, one knows how each group is expected to relate to its complement. Moreover, the various groups do not make contradictory demands on the individual. To be a member of the group of women and a member of the group of old people does not require a different self in each instance. The same self, in which being a woman and being old are integrated, is present in each interaction with members of other groups. When the various groups are not integrated into complementary relationships, they may become special interest groups that make contradictory demands on the individual. For example, the interests of women conflict with those of old people in the competition for scarce

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resources. This is the situation today. Consequently, we now have multiple selves, as many selves as groups to which we belong, even as many selves as individuals we know reasonably well.76 Under these circumstances a group identity becomes a refuge from the vagueness of interpersonal relationships. The most general cause of pluralism, according to van den Berg, is anomie (a term Emile Durkheim popularized). Anomie refers to the failure of moral integration at all levels of society and between individuals. There is no common morality without some kind of authority, if only the old over the young, embedded in a social hierarchy. I am not attempting to justify any hierarchy other than one based on age. Race, ethnicity, and gender should play no part in a social hierarchy. In a more general sense, the integration of groups and individuals involves four factors. First, one belongs to various groups (e.g., age, sex, occupation) without having to gain admittance. One naturally or automatically belongs to the groups appropriate to one’s positions in society. No one is isolated. Second, the various social groups are small, permitting one to have personal knowledge and ties to virtually everyone in the group. Third, the speed of change is quite slow so that customs and traditions appear to be permanent. Fourth, all sectors of social existence—work and play, religion and politics, nature and society—are integrated into a meaningful, coherent totality. Life may not be pleasant but it makes sense.77 What gave rise to anomie in the late eighteenth century? The most important factor was a decline in the belief in God and in the certainty that moral principles as derived from God are objectively true. Religion and moral values were gradually becoming subjective but retained their importance in relation to the individual. Increasingly reason, especially science, defined what was objectively true. Religion and morality were reduced to the private sector of life in the eighteenth century, as evidenced in Adam Smith’s theory of society. When religion and morality began to lose their hold on society as a whole, science and technology, which can only inform us about empirical reality, were not able to integrate society at the level of common meaning and morality. A consequence of anomie, the norm of equality, reinforces and deepens it (anomie). What van den Berg means by the norm of equality is not the equality of a universal love or the equality of an idealistic socialism, but a descriptive norm that everyone is actually

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equal (e.g., in ability, accomplishment, experience, and wisdom). We are all more or less identical. This norm of equality suggests more than that humans should be treated equally but that they are homogeneous. The norm of equality removes all vestiges of authority; moreover it makes us ambivalent about the actual differences among us. When hierarchy is based on achievement, politics, and good fortune, it becomes ephemeral and more difficult to justify. It is easier at times to pretend that we are all equal than to admit to the real differences between us. The contradiction between real inequality and the descriptive norm of equality unleashes anomie in all areas of life.78 With the decline of family, neighborhood, and community and the concurrent emergence of a mass society, large secondary groups have become increasingly prevalent and important. M. P. Baumgartner’s study of the moral life of a suburb illustrates the previous point of human relationships having become vague, insincere, and dangerous. Family members are “atomized,” engaging in few activities that bring them together in serious and sustained interaction; instead much of family life takes place in passive leisure. Family members have separate possessions and separate bedrooms, fully equipped for a privatized existence; moreover, they spend most of their time with friends. Baumgartner refers to this as “moral minimalism” and suggests that the motivating force is the avoidance of conflict. The latter prevents most overt conflicts, but it leaves the family impoverished in regard to “mutual aid.” Baumgartner even refers to suburban families as “voluntary associations” with no one member exercising much authority on other members.79 Not surprisingly, her analysis applies to the neighborhoods of the suburb as well. It is no wonder, then, that voluntary associations or secondary groups have come to dominate modern society; they make few demands on members and are organized around a specific function the individual finds attractive or important. We are organized according to a vast number of voluntary associations or special interest groups. The special interest groups of race, gender, ethnicity, and class stand out. We find it difficult not to regard the individual solely as a product of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Some multiculturalists believe that the designations within a category, for example, male and female, are mutually exclusive in terms of interest and ability to understand each other. If not an equality of respect, at

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least an equality of power! The groups organized around race, gender, and ethnicity are abstract but politicized. New groups related to technological consumerism have appeared: consumption communities and virtual communities. Daniel Boorstin first used the term “consumption community” to refer to people who consume the same product or service, for example, people who eat at McDonald’s. The concept implies that one does this on a more or less regular basis so that one identifies with the product. This is of course what advertising attempts to do—brand us. Now I only drink Miller Lite. Boorstin describes such communities: Men who never saw or knew one another were held together by their common use of objects so similar that could not be distinguished even by their owners. These consumption communities were quick; they were non-ideological; they were democratic; they were public and vague, and rapidly shifting . . . . [They] were malleable, and as easily made as they were evanescent.80

Of special importance here are fan clubs. They are consumption communities, in which the product consumed is a celebrity. We know more celebrities (people in the media) than we know in life and, except for an ever-diminishing number of close friends, know them more intimately.81 Indeed, research indicates that we feel closer to media personalities than we do to acquaintances, and the depth of the emotion is almost as strong as that we experience for our closest friends.82 I think this demonstrates that for a large number of people reality is in the media. In every culture reality is a symbolic reality, that is, it is mediated by a set of meanings expressed in symbol and narrative. Today the media take reality and transform it into an exciting experience for aesthetic consumption. Lawrence Friedman argues that a culture of celebrity is the main driving force in creating a “horizontal society” in which all groups are equal. If I am equal to the celebrity, how can any inequality be seen as permanent? All inequality becomes ephemeral. Virtual communities extend celebrity status to everyone and take impersonality to an even higher level. They have an air of desperation about them. I can chat with an enormous number of people with few risks (if I am careful). I can divulge as little as I choose about myself and remain anonymous. Real emotional and moral commitments are a consequence of sustained face-to-face relationships. Virtual

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communities are no substitute for moral communities; instead they are the dying gasp of the remnants of community. In a much discussed article, psychologists Robert Kraut and Vicki Lundmark studied the effects of Internet use on 96 families over two years. The more time individuals spent online, the more they experienced loneliness and depression. Increased Internet use obviously results in loss of time for actual friends. Relationships that are not based on shared responsibilities and shared difficulties are superficial and ultimately unsatisfactory. The quality and content of communication are more important than the mere quantity.83 Consumption communities and virtual communities promise equality to all and are themselves undeniably equal. The crowd is only one type of group; yet all groups tend in its direction. The crowd appears to be the antithesis of the virtual community, but it shares abstractness and impersonality with the latter. There are crowds at the shopping mall and at sports events and other live entertainment events. We talk about losing ourselves in a crowd, about how people do things in a crowd they would never do alone, and crowds turning into mobs. Some people hate crowds, whereas others find the crowd a hedge against loneliness. Elias Canetti’s brilliant Crowds and Power demonstrates that crowds are about growth, power, and equality. Crowds create a temporary equality that vanishes when one leaves the crowd. Crowd equality is perfect homogeneity; it is the divestment of all differences.84 Crowds provide an escape from individual reason and responsibility, from the demands of a technological society. Bill Wasik has provided us with a fascinating look at how a virtual community can become a crowd. As the creator of the “flash mob,” a real but momentary crowd created by anonymous e-mail or mobile phone to perform an absurd act, Wasik was interested in the phenomena of conformity and “deindividuation” (to be discussed in the following chapter). His target was the “hipster” culture of young professionals in their twenties and thirties. One flash mob was anonymously instructed to assemble in a New York shoe store, and pretending to be members of a tour group, all used their cell phones to tell friends how excited they were to be in the store. Thereupon the flash mob dispersed, not knowing who invited them to perform the meaningless act. Wasik attributed individuals willingness to participate in this spontaneous theater of the absurd to a “joining urge.”85

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Historically people were only members of a few groups: a church group, occupational group, and so forth. Today we are members of an enormous number of groups of varying degrees of importance. From the voluntary association to the virtual community and crowd, we belong to a multitude of abstract and impersonal groups. A mass society makes this necessary. With the disappearance of extended family and community, the individual requires some identity and security in relation to the centralized power of the state and corporation. Individual responsibility and individual freedom are disposable wastes in a technological society; they had been a source of identity. Now one looks to the group to secure one’s rights and acquire political power. The individual has become the sum total of her group identities. The group identities of race, gender, ethnicity, and age have acquired special importance in securing rights. As Friedman notes, “Each status, each identity, has become, as it were, a type of nation, community, or tribe.”86 Domestic politics is concerned to a high degree with the conflicting demands and interests of these groups. Their preoccupation is expanding their group’s rights. The current battles over social security and Medicare are apt illustrations. Americans may be individualists but only within a highly collectivized and politicized environment. Their individual identities are an assemblage of what they consume and the groups to which they belong.

CULTURAL AND COMMUNICATIVE EQUALITY

Another name for cultural and communicative equality is postmodernism. In short, postmodernism is the inability of a technological society to create and maintain a unified culture; consequently, postmodernism refers to cultural fragmentation and ultimately to cultural nihilism. Postmodernism refers as well to a radical skepticism about the need for cultural unity or at least the ability to establish a foundation for it. Postmodernism goes well beyond multiculturalism, which at its minimum is a celebration of diversity and a declaration of the equality of subcultures and cultures. Postmodernism is an attack upon language and the concept of truth. A common culture necessitates a hierarchy of aesthetical and ethical values. Without cultural authority, then, there is a movement toward cultural equality. At its extreme all texts, all interpretations, all

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art forms, all moralities, all meanings are equal. Short of this a plethora of interpretations, none of which is able to dominate for long, compete for attention and influence. Literature, art, and language reflect this fragmentation and tendency toward nihilism. Paradoxically cultural equality is equated with freedom as the absence of authority. The Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century rejected the traditional concept of mimesis. This concept posited an objectively meaningful universe that the artist creatively but still faithfully represented. In this view, the artist is less important than the work of art, which in turn is subordinate to a reality both good and true. The Romantic emphasis on creativity weakened the nexus between the work of art and a symbolic reality so that the work of art and eventually the artist himself becomes more important than the objective reality external to him.87 As Terry Eagleton has noted, the Romantics freed the aesthetical domain from the ethical-religious domain of culture and thus established its autonomy.88 This act of rebellion was also a defensive maneuver to protect art and literature from the logic of industrialized capitalism. Romanticism spawned two theories: the formalist and the visionary. The former justifies art as a separate and autonomous world free from the profit motive and religious hegemony; the latter attempts to aestheticize and claim as its own areas of life external to art.89 In any case, there was a recognition and approval of the fragmentation of culture. For some in the Romantic Movement and its aftermath the unity of nature supplanted the unity of culture. Consequently, art and literature did not immediately feature a subjective world-view that was incapable of making sense of life. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, European literature as a variation of realism began to suggest multiple realities. Erich Auerbach describes this new realism: Multipersonal representation of consciousness, time strata, disintegration of the continuity of exterior events, shifting of the narrative point (all of which are interrelated and difficult to separate).90

Again, Auerbach suggests that this literary method “dissolves reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness.” Moreover, the symbolic nature of these multiple realities is characterized by “haziness, vague indefinability of meaning.” As a result, writers such as Virginia Woolf preferred to write about random

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everyday events of short duration that are examined from multiple perspectives without any definitive conclusion. When life is experienced as a state of flux without objective meaning, then a single narrative becomes impossible. For narrative suggests a plot and principle symbolic events, characters, or ideas that organize and give meaning to time. In Virginia Woolf ’s To The Lighthouse, even the Ramsays’ summer home has a subjective point of view. Auerbach concludes that this subjective realism exhibits “confusion and helplessness,” hopelessness and a certain hostility to the very reality being portrayed, even a “hatred of culture and civilization.”91 American literature after the Second World War caught up with its European counterpart. In The American Novel and the Way We Live Now, John Aldridge suggests that much contemporary writing suggests that “life has become empty of meaning” and without the courage to confront the question of a meaningless death. In his view, a preoccupation with health and technology are our short-term ways of escaping a meaningless reality.92 Don De Lillo’s White Noise perfectly exhibits these tendencies. Jack and Babette Gladney are preoccupied with death, anxious about it to the point of searching out any pharmaceutical or related technology that will relieve them of their anxiety. Aldridge notes that some writers, including Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and William Gaddis, “possess sufficient imagination and moral sensitivity to understand not only that the void exists but from just what standards of order, reason, and humanity we have fallen in the process of entering it.”93 Other writers such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Amy Hempel create a bleak reality of minimal significance with no redeeming features.94 Of special note here is the rise of what Cecilia Tichi terms the “video novel.” Life is like a television show or even a commercial so that a chapter in the novel contains a “patchwork of loosely related scenes without causal sequence— parts of a perceptual environment.”95 Without narrative structure, a novel loses its ability to organize and give meaning to time—everything is spatial and visual.96 Josephine Hendin provides a set of concepts that make explicit some of Aldridge’s and others’ insights. In her analysis of recent American fiction, she discusses anarchic and holistic fiction. In the former, the characters choose a life devoted to random sensations, a quasi-mystical approach that results in psychological fragmentation,

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memorylessness, and a release from a moral self. The latter type of fiction stresses characters who become machine-like in their pursuit of efficiency, management, and external goals such as success. Both types of fiction are the result of a “subjective worldview” and the inability to risk an emotional and moral commitment to others. In short, both types of character are attempting to escape the suffering and emotional risks of life.97 In The Disintegration of Form in the Arts, Erich Kahler examines contemporary art, literature, and language with special attention to painting. In his view, art in general is a “mode of human expression, a manifestation of human existence.” Form and content in art are interrelated: Content is the “what” and form the “how.” Each needs the other. Form involves structure, the inner organization of a work of art, and shape, the outer appearance. Cultural structure is the middle term between form and content because it (cultural structure) provides symbolic depth or meaning to a work of art. Eschewing a single-minded organic approach to art, Kahler distinguishes between closed and open form art. The latter may lack spatial integrity, for example, abstract art, but still convey meaning in the temporal dimension by providing a past or future reference point, a sense of cultural evolution. Cultural structure (meaning) refers to coherence, continuity, consciousness, and consistency. Much of recent art represents an attack upon structure. Some artists reject altogether the idea that art should express meaning, that it should be under any control other than the unconscious creativity of the artist. Art opens itself to the irrational (the unconscious) at the same time it emphasizes innovation, experimentation. (Art mimics technology in its latter emphasis.) Art thus becomes subject to fashion: futurism, presentism, pop art, minimalism, action painting, unfinished art, and avant-garde art, among others. Erich Kahler traces the movement toward incoherence or meaninglessness in twentieth century art.98 With no common aesthetical and ethical standards all art becomes more or less equal. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the authentic and the fraudulent.99 Like art (and literature) discourse is an expression of human experience. The erosion of common meaning in language is the most important development because meaning in literature and even visual art is dependent on it. Having studied the everyday use of language in England and the United States, Kenneth Hudson concludes

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that language is moving in opposite directions: the first is the increasing number of scientific and technical terms with precise, operationalized definitions; the second is the proliferation of terms that have become vague to the point that they convey emotion but little thought.100 Most of the words we use in everyday discourse are of the second kind. The meaning of words that we have previously used to impart a sense of purpose, belief, and value to others now appears to be evaporating. An utterance is a sentence or complex of sentences that is not just virtual, but actual as written or spoken. The meaning of the utterance derives from the social context of its use. That is, utterances refer to other utterances, past, present, and future. A statement (utterance) may directly refer to another statement someone has just made in a conversation, or may directly refer to historical statement; but all meaningful statements draw upon the various cultural contexts within which any use of words is typically embedded. Take the word “love.” A young man and a young woman are discussing romantic love in light of their past experiences, in what they have heard, read, and witnessed. Is each one’s understanding of love shaped by moral and religious discourse like Christian theology or Western moral philosophy, or is it formed by nineteenth century Romantic poetry, by contemporary romance novels, or by television shows like “Friends?” Does each have a largely ethical or aesthetical approach to love? Our understanding of love changes in light of the cultural experiences of others with whom we are in dialogue. Let us suggest, then, that meaning (in the weak sense) refers to qualities that we attribute to or infer from actions, relations, and objects. Because qualitative meaning is becoming vague, the most serious linguistic problems reside with it. Discourse is dependent upon referential contexts. In traditional societies there are myths and religious narratives that provide a sense of ultimate meaning for human existence. Within that larger context, art, literature, and music work to clarify human experience. Political ideology, moral philosophy, and legal theory also offer interpretations of human action. Story, song, and folk wisdom (common sense) do much the same. These common discourses provide us with a sense of each key word in relation to others. Love takes on meaning in relation to beauty, to freedom, or to equality depending upon the referential context. Common discourses provide a narrative or philosophy in which key qualitative concepts become

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interrelated. These referential contexts are living, that is, they are reinterpreted by each generation in light of new experiences and renewed by additional discourses. Such institutional contexts for cultural meaning have lost relevance in a technological civilization. Technology is supplanting shared symbolic experiences as the basis of order. Theology, philosophy, myth, art, literature, history, and political theory have lost much of their power to inspire social action. The traditional humanities and related cultural expressions are irrelevant today; they do not address the lived experiences of people in a technological civilization. For the individual, life is a matter of consumption: products, images, information, personalities. Cultural meaning is thus inherently unstable and even random: there is no common referential context discourse can draw upon. As a consequence, the meaning of words that are not strictly scientific or technical tends to be vague. The vagueness of language is reinforced by the propagandistic use of language in advertising and public relations.101 Meaning involves both sense (the what is said) and referent (the about what) of discourse.102 Referent here pertains to the world beyond language as well as the cultural context. We live in a symbolic universe, but there is more to this universe than language. Words are related both to cultural (referential) contexts and to some part of the world that language points to (referent). Our experiences are shaped by language and everything that we encounter that is not exclusively linguistic. There is a natural ambiguity to all words that are not strictly scientific and technical (operationalized). The referential or cultural context within which words are used reduces some but not all ambiguity. This ambiguity is a strength of natural language in that it permits words to be used in a variety of contexts and be applied to differential experiences. Ambiguity, however, is not the same as vagueness. Vagueness in meaning can occur in two ways. First, the same word or statement can be used in regard to too many entities in the real world. The word “democracy” is used today to refer to virtually every extant government by those who champion its cause; any product in advertising can be called exciting. Second, the word may have nothing to refer to in the world beyond language. For example, Karen Horney observes that we talk so much about love because there is so little of it; the discourse is compensation for the absence of the action. Vagueness is the breaking of the nexus between discourse and referential context.

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The aesthetical and ethical qualities that humans attribute to and infer from their interaction with nature and society arose within and are institutionalized in common discourses, such as myth, story, song, history, literature, and theology. When these common discourses lose their potency, the qualities that they helped to create begin to disappear from human interaction. Unlike material objects, qualities are created in discourse and in actions that embody them. The sterilization of common discourses (referential contexts) means that words become abstract. As Owen Barfield has noted, the definition of a word is only its most abstract meaning. It represents a sketch of all the various uses of the word in discourse. If one only knows the definition of a word, not its various uses in the context of common discourses, one knows the word only as a “collective noun” or a name for a classification of existence. The more abstract a word becomes, the less meaning (context) it possesses. The computer reinforces the tendency of words to be used in an abstract way, for the precision of a program depends upon a word possessing only one meaning.103 When one makes the words that refer to qualities of interaction abstract, one necessarily makes them vague as well. One can measure and thus be abstract about a material object, but to be abstract about meaning is to reify it. The result is atomistic words with fixed meanings that function as self-contained entities. How can an atomistic word not be vague about a quality when those qualities are created in part by the context of common discourses? Atomistic words include jargon, “plastic words,” and “buzzwords.” Add clichés and slogans to atomistic words and phrases, and you get much of everyday discourse as well as advertising and public relations. Cultural and communicative equality comes at a high price—the ability to share meaning with each other. Perhaps never before have so many said so little about so much. Postmodernist theory and deconstructionism in particular provide the ideological justification of cultural fragmentation and meaninglessness. To be sure, postmodernist theory is far from unitary (not that one would expect anything else with cultural fragmentation). Gerald Graff suggests two main types of postmodernist: celebratory and critical.104 The descriptive terms are self explanatory. The celebratory postmodernists, who equate postmodernism with freedom, are more numerous. I will center my attention on this group.

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Celebratory postmodernist thought attacks cultural authority and the related idea of a hierarchy of values. It rejects the Enlightenment project of establishing a rational foundation for culture; likewise it eschews the idea of historicity even short of a philosophy of history. Instead it celebrates a fractured culture in the state of flux with no fixed meanings, no sense of truth. At the same time it prefers the freedom of multiple selves and role-playing to the unity of a moral self. Postmodernism welcomes the triumph of the aesthetical over the ethical-religious domain of culture. As part of postmodernism, deconstructionism is a theory of texts and their interpretations. It is based on a set of assumptions: (1) discourse does not allow us to understand the world beyond the text; (2) texts are inherently contradictory; (3) no discourse is superior to any other, for all interpretations are equal.105 Celebratory postmodernism with its deconstructionist base has a point. If discourse is losing its ability to express common meaning and if culture is fragmented and moving toward a state of meaninglessness, then postmodernism is merely affirming the obvious. The problem lies in the acceptance of this state as preferable to the state of a more or less unified culture. Moreover, celebratory postmodernism makes nihilism seem inevitable, at times regarding an integrated culture as a myth. Critical postmodernists regard the current state of language and culture as neither permanent nor inevitable, recognizing that certain historical forces have brought us to this bleak point. They find no freedom in cultural fragmentation. Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, for example, provide us with such devastating criticism of contemporary life that an alternative is at least implied. Truth is what postmodernism most vehemently contests. For postmodernists truth is political. The traditional concept of truth goes beyond the idea of fact. Truth suggests a reason for making my actions correspond to my words. Do I keep my word? Do I live up to my beliefs? Can I be trusted? The idea of truth is an ethical value that is traditionally believed to be transcendent. Whether the concept of truth is justified on religious or philosophical grounds, it has been considered to be absolute. Truth puts a halt to relativity. For science, truth becomes the correspondence between theory and fact. With the triumph of the scientific worldview, truth is equated with the facts that science establishes.

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The radical skepticism of postmodernism rejects the idea of truth, reducing all ideas to power and self-interest.106 Even scientific theory comes under attack. We know now from Kurt Gödel that all logical systems contain presuppositions that can only be justified by arguments external to the system. There is no unassailable foundation for knowledge. So even the assertion that science provides us with truth is rejected in postmodernism. What is often missed in the discussion is that truth has moved from science to technology. Truth has been materialized in technology; it is equated with power, success, efficiency.107 Modern science only has its great prestige because of its bond with technology (applied science). Postmodernists may be right about power as the basis of truth, but they are wrong on two counts. First, that power is technological before it is political. Technological power, which is objective, fosters the idea of power as subjective and thus fully political in part because we don’t understand what stands behind political competition—the abstract power of technology. Second, postmodernists often fail to recognize that historically truth has most often not been lived and perceived as political. One cannot generalize from our current malaise. Postmodern skepticism and the tacit equation of technology with truth results in a full-blown nihilism. Deconstructionism as a theory is waning, and academics seem weary of debates about postmodernism. These theories have done their work and like all academic fashions can move to the stacks of outdated ideas. Yet today we are all postmodernists and even deconstructionists. We are suspicious of politicians, corporate executives, religious leaders, and each other. We doubt that they tell us the truth, believing instead that their pronouncements flow from selfinterest. And often they do! Recoiling from a Hobbesian war of all against all, we preach radical toleration. We should tolerate all moralities, all lifestyles, all forms of artistic expression, all ideas (unless of course they infringe upon my self-interest). All forms of culture, all discourses, all interpretations are equal now, and we must accept this as an indisputable good. Bereft of a common culture, it is all we have left. Studies of high school and college students indicate just how widespread these unconscious beliefs are. In some instances a majority of students approve of cheating and lying if one has a good (read: selfish) reason.108 Christina Sommers has called attention to

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the teaching of ethics in public schools. Methods such as Values Clarification and Cognitive Moral Development stress values as subjective choices. Sommers goes on to articulate the worldview of students entering college: (1) motivation is selfish (psychological egoism); (2) morality is relative; (3) radical toleration of other lifestyles; (4) and moral responsibility is centered in groups and organizations.109 University professors complain about students who are unwilling to exercise moral judgment even about atrocities like the Holocaust. A recent encounter with one of my students brought home the severity of the problem. The student had never taken an essay exam before, and inquired whether he could express his views in the answers. I explained he could but emphasized that first and foremost I was evaluating how well he understood the readings. He did not realize that the acts of reading and listening contain a subjective component. He kept insisting that he be allowed to express his own view. I pressed him on this. He finally explained, “What I mean by own view is that if it’s raining outside and I say it is not, then that’s my point of view.” The implication, of course, was that not only was it his point of view, but also that it was correct for him. I suggested to my solipsistic student that he may be wasting his time at college where other points of view are entertained. Cultural and communicative equality make plural equality necessary, while plural equality deepens and reinforces cultural equality. Both are a consequence of the decline of moral communities and the unity of culture.

CHAPTER 4

5 The Reality of Freedom and Equality The reality of freedom and equality is the exact opposite of the ideology. A technological civilization destroys all values other than that of power (efficiency, success). It turns all values into their opposites: Freedom becomes tyranny, necessity, and fate; equality becomes inequality and becomes uniformity with the face of diversity.

FREEDOM AS FORCED CONSUMERISM

Freedom is equated with consumer choice. If one has the means, the choices seem unlimited. The real issue, however, is not the number of choices but the question of choice itself. How is choice directed and constrained? The traditional model in economics afforded the consumer autonomy and power. Consumer demand forced producers to respond in kind and quantity. The “revised sequence” (John Kenneth Galbraith’s term) is that for purposes of planning corporations create demand. His argument is a variation of Karl Polanyi’s thesis that when capitalism was industrialized, the cost of rapidly changing technology required a cheap supply of land, labor, and money to minimize the risk of investment.1 Galbraith observes that because of the size and complexity of its operations, and its capital investments, the modern corporation necessarily attempts to predict and control the future through planning.2 The latter necessarily involves manipulating consumer behavior. The corporation must control consumer demand in order to maintain its share of the market and to expand productivity in the future. The corporation must 63

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be able to count on an ever-increasing number of consumers eager to purchase its products. Advertising is the principal force in creating and controlling demand, but there are important ancillary methods as well. Product design, model change, packaging, placement in the retail store, and marketing strategies are all part of the attempt to control consumers.3 The use of polling techniques and demographics allows advertising to alter the message to fit the targeted audience. The Internet allows advertisers to adjust the presentation to each specific consumer based on past purchases. Advertising has to be understood as more than a method or a major component of the economy, however, it is a form of propaganda. Propaganda is the manipulation of public opinion; its antithesis is rational persuasion in dialogue with another individual. Psychological manipulation is irrational in nature, creating symbolic and stereotypical relationships of fear and desire. Jacques Ellul has distinguished between political propaganda and sociological propaganda. The latter is a more diffuse form of propaganda in that it does not have a centralized source or belong to a specific group as with political propaganda, for example, a political party or the government. Sociological propaganda is more spontaneous and unconscious and tends to reflect common belief, a “way of life.” Sociological propaganda is replete in television, movies, video games, education, but especially in advertising and public relations.4 In a sense, sociological propaganda merges with culture (at least in a technological civilization). Daniel Boorstin has referred to advertising as America’s “folk culture.”5 The implication is that business exploits sociological propaganda but does not control it the same way a political party does political propaganda. Sociological propaganda is ubiquitous and its content belongs to everyone. Advertising and public relations are essentially the same. The former creates an image for a product, the latter for a celebrity or a corporation. Many New York advertising agencies own a public relations firm or have a reciprocal agreement with one.6 Some estimates of advertising saturation suggest that Americans are exposed to at least 16,000 ads each day.7 These ads are on billboards, in magazines and newspapers, on external clothing labels, on the Internet, television, and radio, in schools, and on the sides or top of buses, taxis, and even police cars. We respond with varying degrees of awareness of course. Public relations stories account for roughly

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70 percent of information disseminated as news in the media.8 Entire sections of the newspaper, for example, entertainment, real estate, automotive, food, and home repair, are almost exclusively the product of public relations releases from various industries. By 1995, the number of public relations practioners outnumbered reporters.9 Advertising and to a certain extent public relations make use of three symbolic formats (see chapter 3): product image, lifestyle, and personalized. The product image format is common to both advertising and public relations. Take branding, for instance. The aim here is to create a personality for a product (product image) that is exciting, attractive, hip, and so forth. The personality of the brand, GAP clothing, it turns out, allows the company to “brand” the consumer the way cattle are branded. An insert into my local newspaper for Kohl’s Department Store put it perfectly: “Denim Destination Pledge Allegiance to Your Brand.” Branding works as well to create what Boorstin terms “consumption communities.”10 These loose knit and ephemeral “communities are based on common ownership or consumption patterns, for example, everyone who eats at McDonald’s. Consumption communities reflect lifestyle choices and are a consequence of the lifestyle advertising format. People who own a certain product may even belong to a club, for example, a Corvette Corral. Corvette owners are perceived by some to be upper-middle-class people who prefer conspicuous consumption to long term savings, excitement to security. Consumption refers to more than goods and services; it is even more about information and images. Few of us can purchase everything our hearts desire, but all of us can acquire knowledge about goods, services, virtual experiences, and the like. We can all become connoisseurs. This is the true goal of advertising, for connoisseurs eventually purchase the finest product they can afford. As Ellul puts it: “Information leads to obligatory consumption in the same way as suburban living leads to the obligatory use of the automobile.”11 Connoisseurship is related to the personalized format. The object of my devotion becomes a kind of personal totem: I merge with that which I most desire. The consumer has been transformed into a connoisseur. If advertising and public relations have become the American popular culture (the dominant culture), then they must express the deepest beliefs of the American people. I have discussed this in detail elsewhere;12 consequently my treatment here will be brief.

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Neil Postman pointed out that advertisements should be understood as religious parables. Postman analyzed the longest run commercial in the history of American television, sometimes referred to as the “ring around the collar” ad. Like many television ads, this one had several versions of varying length. The basic storyline features a husband who works at an office and a stay-athome wife. In one version, the husband is upset when a waitress calls attention to the gray collar around the neck of his white shirt; his wife in turn is embarrassed for she does the laundry, apparently not very well. In another version, co-workers notice the ring around the collar. The next day a Wisk representative shows up at their doorstep and once inside shows the hapless housewife how to do the laundry correctly. The husband’s glistening white shirt subsequently earns him the admiration of fellow employees and even a promotion. In a longer version of the ad, the husband and wife are transported (if only in their imaginations) to a holiday paradise with the promise of marriage renewal. Postman maintains that the logic of the parable moves from problem to solution and from discontent to contentment. That is, the advertised product Wisk solves the problem of the ring around the collar and turns the married couple’s unhappiness to happiness.13 A powerful product indeed! By calling advertisements religious parables Postman is suggesting that the ads should be understood as symbolic and mythological. The foundation of a culture is the collective experience of the sacred, that which is perceived to be most powerful, most real, and of absolute value. Symbol and myth express as it were the theory of the sacred, whereas ritual is the practice of the sacred (an attempt to influence the power of the sacred). Myth entails a narrative that integrates and makes sense of the various symbols or sacred metaphors.14 Technology is the paramount sacred force in modern societies. It has supplanted nature and society in this regard. Ultimately what is experienced as sacred is one’s life milieu. The myth of technological utopianism expresses our deepest desires and expectations for technology. The myth goes something like this: Science and technology (applied science) are directing us to a state of maximum production and consumption, a utopia. Technology provides the solutions to all environmental and human problems, thereby allowing society to achieve ever greater efficiency. The technological utopia is the “promised land of total consumption.”15 People are

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free to choose among the myriad of goods, services, and experiences those that will bring them maximum happiness, perfect health, and eternal youth. The myth of technological utopianism is comprised of four symbols: success, survival, happiness, and health. The first two refer primarily but not exclusively to the condition of the organization or society. Success and survival are about power; survival is minimal success and success is maximum survival. The latter two refer to the individual and consumption. Health is the individual’s survival, whereas happiness has become the defining moment of individual success. One can readily identify these symbols in the myth of technological utopianism. Success and happiness are the “strong” symbols; survival and health take on meaning only in relationship to their counterparts. Postman’s logic of the religious parable—problem to solution, discontent to contentment—is about success and happiness as mythological symbols. Each ad contains one or another of the two symbols, solution (success) or contentment (happiness), but the other is always implied. Advertisements are mininarratives of technological utopianism. Television programs are longer versions of the advertisements. Television programs are ads for advertisements. In Technology as Magic, I suggested that no one program contains all four mythological symbols, but that taken together the various genres of television program contain them all. There are four types of programs that dramatize almost exclusively one of the four symbols. Sports programs are about winning or success; every other value including sportsmanship is secondary. Businessmen and politicians use sports metaphors to describe their efforts and goals. Children’s shows are about happiness. The animated characters invariably wind up happy, and the toys, candy, and cereals in the accompanying adds teach children the true meaning of happiness. News programs focus attention on survival or failure. Most news is bad: how many people were killed or survived the latest earthquake, for instance. Soap operas are concerned with the physical and mental health of the characters, with the stress of life and how we cope with it.16 The world advertising, television, video games, and related media create is mythological; it exists outside time and space. But this is what makes it such a compelling world. For it is the world that I am expected to desire and work to achieve. To exercise freedom

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in rejecting the imaginary world of technological utopianism would be a radical act indeed. We may criticize other people’s consumer choices, but we all believe that the meaning of life resides in increased consumption.17

FREEDOM AS LEGAL PROCESS

The idea of choice is a core element of the current understanding of freedom, and, as we have seen, it is related to the concept of right. The paradox of choice is that to each new set of choices a complex of regulations and laws corresponds.18 Which is more important— choice or regulation? Occupational licensing laws, for instance, have a long history going back to medieval guilds and estates. Many professions and occupations today are only open to those who have undergone an educational or training program, passed a variety of tests, and been certified by a state agency to practice the trade in question. Is the freedom to choose an occupation and to practice it as one sees fit restricted by occupational licensing laws? On the other hand, is the freedom of the consumer enhanced by knowing that the choice of a doctor, for example, is a choice among qualified professionals? Occupational licensing takes some of the risk out of choice, but freedom necessarily involves risk. Many consumer choices are subject to what Friedman terms “mandatory brokering.” One must use a licensed electrician in wiring a new addition to one’s house; one must have a doctor’s prescription to obtain many medicines. The assumption is that because life has become so specialized and the risks so great, consumers must be protected against their own ignorance. Rights or entitlements are the institutionalization of choice in law. Philip Howard observes that this is the inverse of what rights represented in eighteenth century America. James Madison articulated a more general sentiment that rights were a protection against government control and interference. The right of free speech, the right of association, the right to own property were a buffer against laws the legislature might be tempted to pass.19 Rights have always been connected with the idea of responsibility or duty. A right provides for both choice and responsibility. Someone or some organization is responsible for providing me with the choices inherent in a right; at the same time, however, I am

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responsible for respecting the rights of others. The meaning of responsibility has moved from the idea of cause to that of consequence. I am responsible for the damage I do, but I am likewise responsible for what certain others do, for example, I am responsible for the toy my child breaks in a department store. Consequence as responsibility moves well beyond personal and intentional cause. Some organization at the very least must be responsible for my being overweight: the fast food industry. As a consequence of McDonald’s offering cheap, fast food, I am fat. Perhaps McDonald’s is even liable for my poor health. The notion that someone is responsible for everything that happens is, according to Friedman, a part of the expectation for “total justice.” It is my right to be compensated for any adversity in life.20 In order to insure that an individual or a group’s rights are not violated, due process becomes central to the workings of government and even some corporations. Because rights today are a benefit, a “kind of wealth,” the expectation is that they will be dispensed fairly. The type and number of rights have been expanding over the past 40 years and so has due process as a part of managerial technique. Howard maintains that the due process emphasis in organizations is a by-product of the “legal process school” of law that became prominent in the early 1960s. In this view, government should be remodeled in the form of a court. Those who came under the aegis of government administration should in many instances be granted due process of law. The executive branch of government was to function as if it were the judicial branch. What this means in practice is that “ordinary decisions are subject to rigid formalities.”21 Tenure, promotion, and even merit decisions at both public and private universities are most often mediated by the concept of due process. At my university a departmental committee makes a tenure decision, which is forwarded to a college committee, which in turn makes a decision that is forwarded to the Provost of the university. If either the College Committee or the Provost disagrees with the departmental committee, or if the candidate makes an appeal, the decision will be sent to the University Review Committee. The latter may decide to send the decision to the Ethics and Grievance Committee if the committee members believe that the tenure candidate has been denied due process. Eventually the decision goes to the president. At every stage of decision making, due process is the rule. The various

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committees involved in an appeal set up tribunals modeled on a legal court to observe due process. The candidate’s qualifications sometimes take a back seat to the issue of whether due process has been observed in the hearings. Due process, however, is based today upon procedural rules. Law based on principles is at odds with law based on procedure. The former entails judgment on the part of those who administer and especially those who adjudicate the law. Principles depend on the context of their origin and their application for their meaning. By contrast procedural rules are highly specific and technical with the goals of covering every eventuality and of maintaining uniformity in the interest of equality. Procedural rules are essentially bureaucratic rules. The advantage procedural rules have over legal principles is that no judgment is required in applying them—they are final rules. The great disadvantage is that life cannot be reduced to a logical code and legal process. When law becomes a system of final rules, every decision is a binary choice. Life’s complexities are ironed out, and law becomes ritualistic.22 Procedural rules are a technique of management. They are less about what and more about how. Procedural rules as the basis of legal process aim to provide efficiency and uniformity and, for good measure, justice. The confusion of justice with efficiency in law and bureaucracy in general is widespread. Guilty plea negotiation in criminal cases is a prime example. Abraham Blumberg’s analysis of a criminal court demonstrated that the public defender was part of the overall bureaucracy striving for efficiency (over 90 per cent of the cases were resolved without going to trial).23 Howard observes that legal process has become a “kind of religion.” More appropriate perhaps is Friedman’s claim that law has replaced traditional authority.24 Law in all forms extends its reach to all of life; nothing is outside its purview. This is what was referred to previously as “legalization.”25 This is the fundamental reason for so much litigation today. Greed plays a part, but the demand for total justice is more important. The latter is an expression of the tacit recognition that there is no authority beyond the law. Law is not a means to apply moral norms to human interaction—it is an end in itself. Law is pure technique, it is a subsystem within the technological system. Procedural law and bureaucratic rule are identical in their emphasis on efficiency, uniformity, and finality. Procedural law aids

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and abets the spread of bureaucracy. Every organization generates a mind-set, a psychological mode of adaptation. In this instance the “bureaucratic mind” is the paramount way individuals adjust to legalization and the ubiquitous presence of bureaucracy. Karl Marx and later Max Weber wrote about the bureaucratic mind. For Marx in particular, it possessed two related characteristics: the “deification of authority” and a sense that everything should be subject to bureaucratic manipulation.26 The bureaucrat lives in a cynical world perceived to be exclusively about power. In a world of naked power, one has two choices: adjust to a power greater than one’s own and manipulate a lesser power. The bureaucratic mind is most equated with the deification of authority or obedience to authority syndrome. The compelling attitude that one must follow the rules derives from several related factors. The first is a sense of powerlessness. When power becomes complex and abstract as with bureaucracy, employees and citizens feel resistance is futile. The second has to do with a lack of privacy. When our actions are always visible to others through surveillance, including computer monitoring, we may engage in what Shoshana Zuboff calls “anticipatory conformity.”27 Managers can use the peer group at work to pressure employees to identify with the company, follow the rules, and increase productivity. Employees here are under the surveillance of the peer group as well as management. The most “selfless” and complete form of obedience is to conform to rules that don’t yet exist but are only anticipated. The Board of Higher Education in Illinois has on occasion imposed accountability and assessment devices on faculty to measure our effectiveness. At various times, university administrators have demanded that departments begin to assess performance before the Board had even decided it was necessary. One argument was it would look better if we did the assessment before it was imposed on us. A requiem for academic freedom. The appearance of freedom is critical, for otherwise many would realize that we have become servants of the very bureaucratic and technological system we have created. Hence, the expansion of rights. I am not belittling the good the concept of right aptly applied has accomplished. Instead I am talking about the expansion of the concept of right to the point it is equated, as Milan Kundera duly noted, with desire. This inflated sense of right and the legalistic and bureaucratic control of right is our meager compensation for being

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integrated into the technological system. We have rights but only to the extent they serve the interests of the technological system.

FREEDOM AS TECHNOLOGICAL NECESSITY

The technological system is not static: as a milieu or environment, it is constantly changing. Jacques Ellul has discussed two related aspects of the movement of technology that are most pertinent in understanding technological fatalism. The latter is a tacit recognition of our complete dependence upon, need for, and powerlessness in regard to an external force. Fatalism is most often discussed in regard to nature; technology is our new “nature.” Self-augmentation and automatism are the two characteristics of the technological system most associated with our experience of fatalism. Self-augmentation refers to technology developing without “decisive human intervention.”28 That is, we create technology and employ it, but because we believe in it as promise and panacea, we allow technology to proliferate without serious moral judgment about its worth and consequences. Consequently, the technological system is out of control; it does not possess true feedback. Decisions about technology are part of the self-augmentation process. These decisions are technical in that they are about efficiency and coordination. At most we retain the power of veto, deciding against a technology that is not well adapted to its environment, for example, to be efficient a tank has to be able to perform well on the terrain in which it will be used. So far humans have resisted using nuclear weapons on a mass scale because of the dire consequences. We must remember, however, that the irrational will to power drives technological use as well as rational considerations of efficiency. Technological specialization militates against moral responsibility. Numerous technicians make a series of small discoveries that are interconnected and have consequences that no one person or group can anticipate. The drive to find multiple uses for a single technology, for instance, laser technology, and the desire to coordinate disparate technologies at the level of information are never questioned. The innovations of countless individual technicians are offset by the “blind self-augmentation of the system.”29 Self-augmentation is related to two historical “laws” of a technological civilization: (1) technical progress is irreversible30; and (2) if

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something can be done, it will be done.31 The former law is not metaphysical or scientific, but historical. It means that there has been no large movement backwards to a previous stage of technological development. There are small scale utopian movements that look back with nostalgia on the past, but these are exceptions to the rule. Indeed many of these movements, like the hippie movement of the 1960s, depend on a society’s advancement so that it can offer an escape without paying too high a price. The hippies could only exist in an affluent society that was able to support and tolerate their experimental lifestyle.32 The second law calls attention to the normative cast of a technological civilization. In traditional societies, there was a tension between what is and what ought to be. The latter was moral and often derived from religious belief. The assumption was that human interaction was imperfect, often selfishly motivated, so that moral norms provided a check against self-interest. In a technological civilization, the tension is between what is and what is possible. Possibility is exclusively technical and becomes, as it were, a moral good.33 Automatism is closely related to self-augmentation and overlaps with it in meaning and in practice. In a narrow sense, automatism suggests that when the single best (efficient) method is discovered, it will necessarily be employed. Automatism likewise affects the adaptation of humans to technology and the erosion of areas of life not subject to technique. The tempo or speed at which technology forces us to live is perhaps the greatest adaptation humans must make to technology. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has demonstrated how each major technology alters our sense of time and space. In an analysis of railway travel in the nineteenth century, he demonstrates how it produced panoramic vision, for instance. Railway time replaced a sense of time that was yoked to the rhythms of nature. He goes on to demonstrate how we more generally react to new and powerful technological stimuli. Because a machine is statistically susceptible to an accident at any time, it tends to frighten us more than the “accidents” of nature, such as a hurricane, which occur only on occasion. To control our terror we develop a “stimulus shield,” a way of normalizing or internalizing the stimuli. Life returns to normal but our sense of space and time have been altered—both have shrunk. Once we adjust to the new tempo of life, it is difficult, Schivelbusch argues, to return to a previous pace of life.34 This is an important reason why increasing numbers of people find it boring to read,

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write, and think. Reading, writing, and thinking require quiet, time alone, and a slower pace of life. Many would prefer the phrenetic stimulation of the electronic media, which force us to adapt to their rapidly changing visual images and higher level of noise. As a result we become more like machines, preferring to remain in a state of constant stimulation and motion.35 An apt example is the level of musical noise and often accompanying visual stimuli in a bar for people in their twenties and thirties. Conversation is impossible. People respond to each other by reflex and instinct. Perhaps we are becoming machines with animal instincts. Automatism likewise involves colonization of life by technology. As discussed in the previous chapter, there is no area of life not subject to nonmaterial technology. Religion, politics, sexuality, and education are replete with technique. Advertising, public relations, therapy, and management permeate all social institutions. Technology appears to fill the void automatically in an area not yet fully subject to technique. Once again, this is a consequence of our blind faith in technology rather than a hypostatization of technology. Ellul has analyzed how self-augmentation and automatism work together.36 When a more efficient way of acting is discovered, it makes obsolete a traditional way of doing something. The use of the mass media to spread Christianity supplants individual responsibility for evangelism. This is self-augmentation. On the other hand, when faith declines and belief becomes mere conformity, religion automatically becomes a psychological technique for achieving a sense of well-being or what Will Herberg called “peace of mind.” This is automatism.37 Self-augmentation and automatism are both part of the larger movement of the technological system, changing without effective human control and demanding that everything be brought under its aegis. How could we not regard technology as our fate? We have abandoned ourselves to our own creation, deified it, and given it responsibility for our very existence. But fate is necessity, not freedom. This is the most pernicious deception ever perpetrated—that technology is about freedom: The freedom to gather technical information, to choose among a plethora of technical objects, and to be endlessly stimulated. Our freedom is so circumscribed by technological necessity that it is rendered superficial and ultimately impotent. Our fatalism about technology is reflected in advertising and political propaganda. On occasion advertising slogans put it directly:

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“Life without technology isn’t an option” (Datatel advertisement), “We can’t wait for tomorrow” (Alcoa advertisement). The meaning of the first ad is obvious, the second less so. The latter ad’s meaning is not so much one of impatient yearning as that of creating the future now. The future is a determined closed future, but we can speed up its arrival. More prevalent, however, are the indirect messages about technological fatalism. Advertising and public relations portray technology as omnipotent (the solution to all problems) and as omnipresent. Clearly there is no way for us to escape its grasp; we must give in to its ineluctable progress. The mass media in general create an eternal present.38 The domination of visual images destroys the narrative context that provides us with a sense of qualitative time. Moreover, the historical context of programs is shallow. The overall sequence of ads and programs is random. The media present us with a random, incoherent present. An eternal present would appear to contradict the idea of fate, but both have little regard for history. From history we derive experience, memory, and the motivation to create something new. Apparently our fate is to live in an eternal present of quantitative technological changes without the desire to create history. Politicians, city planners, corporate executives, and university administrators engage in forecasting as part of planning for the future. At first glance forecasting is the opposite of fatalism: It appears to be an attempt to control the future rather than submit to it. Remember, however, that a belief in fate or fortune did not prevent fortune tellers and soothsayers from divining the future so as to make the necessary adjustments in the present. An open free future can never be forecast, for it is the result of the intersection of chance and human risk taking. To create history means to make something essentially new, not accidentally different. Hans Kelsen put it well, “Whatever is grasped of the future by means of knowledge is, at bottom, merely the past.”39 Modern forecasting dooms us to technological development; it is a “scientific” version of fortune-telling. Forecasting becomes fatalism about the future. Conspiracy theories abound on the Internet, in the movies, on television, in literature,40 and are a staple topic of everyday conversation. These theories have an aura of paranoia about them, for example, the theory that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks of September 11 to justify invading Iraq. Paranoid conspiracy

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theories are a reflection of a technological system out of control. It is almost impossible for people to understand that power has become abstract, that it resides in technological and bureaucratic systems. Certain individuals benefit from these systems more than others, but do not fully control them. As technological systems become more complex and interdependent, the ordinary citizen, who is a generalist, can not understand them. Even a specialist can only comprehend actions related to his own area of specialization. And yet we need to blame real people for all the natural and moral evil we see around us. Someone or some group must be responsible. Paranoid conspiracy theories reinforce our sense of technological fatalism by deepening our feelings of powerlessness. The decline of language is assuredly the paramount reason we are losing the fight against fatalism. In the technological milieu human symbolization is becoming sterilized. Historically, symbolization was for humans to exercise some control over their milieu. By incorporating it within their symbol systems such as myth, they gained a sense of mastery. Ellul argues that the human ability to symbolize has been the single most important factor in the cultural evolution of the human race. Because technology is our own creation we do not perceive a need to symbolize it in the traditional sense. It is only when we confront a foreign power—nature—that we bring it within our symbolic net. Symbolization simultaneously creates a meaningful world and allows us to distance ourselves from this world. Without effective symbolization, we have no way to keep from being captured by the technological milieu.41 Symbolic thought, which is fundamental to the milieus of nature and society, employs the medium of language; technical thought, which is dominant in the milieu of technology, expresses itself in visual images, especially those of the mass media. Visual images are the language of technology.42 Visual images in the company of abstract words are meaningless, yet function as “symbols.” They are in effect false symbols whose “meaning” is materialized. Technology symbolizes itself with these false symbols. These technological symbols are reified metaphors. In traditional metaphor, meaning springs from the dysjunction between literal and figurative meaning. The metaphor “love is a journey” is not to be taken literally, nor is the figurative meaning to be overemphasized. Meaning resides in tension between the two. Metaphor as well typically involves comparing something less well defined to something better known.

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Love (less well defined) is compared to a journey (more precisely known and defined). Visual or technological metaphors (symbols) eliminate the tension between literal and figurative and simply associate a word or concept with a thing. Hence figurative meaning disappears. In the famous advertisement, for Coca-Cola, the words love and peace are associated with children from all over the world holding hands, and hand holding with Coca-Cola. Love is reified as holding hands and more importantly as Coca-Cola.43 And yet we cannot help trying to provide technology with symbolic meaning. In his analysis of 12,000 Words, a dictionary of new words that appeared between 1961 and 1985, Raymond Gozzi demonstrates a pattern of “externalizing human qualities onto machines.” Computers now possess brains, memories, and have languages. For some enthusiasts, they have souls. Science fiction has even turned computers into living beings who wish to have sex with humans. Concomitantly, however, we mechanize human relationships. Hence, today we create networks and interface with other people, and even plug into their lifestyles or personalities.44 We have created a closed system: we project human qualities onto technology but the human has already been rendered technological. Language, and the moral judgment it permits, is the source of human freedom. To act freely we must understand and discuss with others the causes of our unfreedom. The meaning of most words in a natural language is ambiguous. Polysemy allows words to be used in a variety of interpersonal contexts. Because ambiguity of meaning is only partially resolved by context, no one perfectly understands another so that he or she remains somewhat a mystery. The natural ambiguity provides us with a degree of freedom then.45 Advertising, public relations, and political propaganda use language as an agent of control by stripping discourse of meaning so that we are left with abstract words and phrases associated with visual images. Language is often used for ideological purposes, but every natural language harbors within itself a possible revolution of new meanings and liberating thoughts. This is why the erosion of common meaning and symbolism in language is essential to the destruction of human freedom. Søren Kierkegaard’s profound insights into the nature of freedom are apt. He uses three terms—necessity, possibility, and actuality—to frame the question. Actuality (lived reality that embodies

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freedom) is a dialectic of necessity and possibility. What I am at the moment is necessity; what I aspire to be in the future is possibility. Freedom involves the struggle to make actuality more than necessity, to bring possibility into existence. Without possibility, everything is necessary, that is, completely determined. But possibility without necessity exists only in imagination. Kierkegaard offers the example of an infant making nonsensical sounds. The necessity to make these sounds comes from discomfort or pleasure. Only the possibility that language provides can turn the sounds into words. Freedom is the endless struggle to turn possibility into necessity and to make necessity yield new possibilities.46 Ellul has applied these thoughts about possibility and necessity to technology. The computer and television give us visual evidence of the infinite possibilities of technology; like an almighty being there is nothing it cannot accomplish. Yet technology’s possibility is not my possibility, for technology does not depend upon my subjective experience. Nor can I control its growth and consequences in any decisive way: I am merely along for the ride. Most importantly, technology has become the universal means of acting. There is no domain of life not mediated by technique. Every effective possibility is technical. An exclusive possibility is a necessity. When possibility becomes necessity, freedom disappears.47

EQUALITY AS GROUP CONFORMITY AND COMPETITION

The ideology of plural equality centers on group identity and power. The other side of identity is conformity, and the other side of power is relentless competition. The Enlightenment view of equality was, as we have seen, based on individualism. Individual human beings were equal under certain circumstances. Equality presupposed freedom of the individual. Conformity to the group creates a forced equality as opposed to a free equality. Despite all the proclamations and expressions of individualism, the past two centuries have witnessed the ascendancy of the peer group and public opinion over the individual. Conformity is hardly a new phenomenon. All societies depend on it to a greater or lesser extent. One conforms to moral and legal norms, ritualistic practices, and the expectations of others. Conformity

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confers a kind of equality on its practioners. We become equal in following the rules and adjusting to the group. Nothing promotes a momentary sense of equality more than the crowd. Crowds are not invariably comprised of strangers; a crowd can initially begin with a well-defined group. But the crowd desires to expand its number and influence; this is what Elias Canetti calls the open crowd, the truest expression of the crowd phenomenon. Within the crowd there is a sense of “absolute equality” because all divisions between people are momentarily obliterated. Consequently the crowd relishes the density of becoming one. Nothing can separate the members of the crowd: all sense of individuality is suppressed. Finally, the crowd requires a goal or direction, but it often matters little what the specific direction is. The ecstasy of being all in one and one in all takes precedence over rational goals.48 Communitas and scapegoating are two processes of the crowd. Victor Turner refers to the complex of emotions engendered by rituals of reversal as “communitas.” In his view nothing promotes a sense of total equality more than the mass violation of taboos and moral norms and the inversion of the social structure that occur in the festival. The social structure is inverted by men and women, young and old, exchanging statuses during the ritual performance of the festival. Traditional societies permit a period of “anti-structure” when cultural values and social structure are overturned. We become equal in our collective defiance of the established order.49 René Girard has called attention to the enormous importance of scapegoating in creating and maintaining social order. The scapegoat allows the rest of the crowd to unite in opposition to him. This effectively puts an end to the mimetic rivalry and violence that eliminated real differences among group members. Mimetic rivals act in increasingly similar ways, for example, violent accusations, and thus are a threat to social order that necessarily involves differences. Because the scapegoat and his “crime” represent a difference the crowd can not allow, his elimination allows the previous differences, for example, male vs. female, to reemerge.50 Equality within a crowd or mob appears to be universal. The overriding importance of the peer group and public opinion is peculiar to the past two centuries and the emergence of a mass society (see chapter 1). A mass society is one that is concurrently highly individualistic and strongly collectivistic.51 With the gradual decline in the authority of local communities and extended families in the

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nineteenth century, individuals became more equal and independent of each other. Not under the control of his father and the local priest, a son migrated to the city to find employment. Independent of others, he was now an individual necessarily concerned with his own well-being first. At the same time authority became centralized in government, bureaucracy, corporations, and the mass media. There was no buffer such as community and family between the individual and centralized power. The new sources of power used the needs, fears, and desires of the emotionally independent individual to control him. The individual is ambivalent about this new-found independence (equality). As Tocqueville notes, at first he is ecstatic about being on his own, making his own decisions, and so forth. But almost immediately he experiences fear of others (his equals). The decline of moral authority in community and family destroys the basis of trust. He can’t rely on and trust his fellow competitors. In his psychological weakness, he turns to the law and government for help and falls under the sway of public opinion.52 Public opinion can only develop in relation to the mass media, which both expresses and controls it. Public opinion is made necessary by the decline of effective interpersonal discourse in communities and families. Public opinion, Tocqueville maintains, controls Americans in positive and negative ways. In his famous essay, “The Omnipotence of the Majority,” Tocqueville argues that in a democracy the individual identifies with the majority, believing that there is more “wisdom” in the group than any single individual. The majority, the public, becomes the collective image of the individual. Ironically the individual merges with common opinion. At the same time, however, public opinion creates a “fear of isolation” in the individual. If I go against public opinion, people will ridicule and reject me. He noted that public opinion saved us from having to think for ourselves and that nowhere was it stronger than in America.53 Somehow having the same opinion as others doesn’t appear to be a dimunition of individual freedom as long as the individual is allowed to express her view in a poll or in voting. In conforming to public opinion, the individual vanishes. In traditional societies the peer group was not autonomous; it was part of community. Prior to the onset of industrialized capitalism, youth were bound together in fraternal organizations or in village youth groups. The former were found in schools, professions,

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the military, and the clergy; the latter were ubiquitous in villages. Everyone from age fourteen until marriage participated in village youth group. Most importantly for our purposes, both kinds of youth groups were under the loose control of adults. They were integrated into the community so that their activities were not invisible to adults.54 With the disintegration of a traditional hierarchy and the resultant pluralism, groups based on age, gender, ethnicity, and religion became autonomous. As with the subject of public opinion, Kierkegaard and Tocqueville were among the most astute observers in the nineteenth century; David Riesman, in the twentieth century. In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman identified an other-directed character type that was becoming dominant in America. Other-directed refers primarily to the peer group. Social character, according to Riesman, exists on a cultural level. It sets the direction for and limits to the development of individual personality. The tradition-directed character type is the most prevalent historically, dominating precapitalist agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer groups. Authority resides in sacred traditions, both myth and ritual, and individuality is not sharply defined. Individuals share a common heritage and identity. The paramount form of psychological control is shame. Unless others shame, ridicule, or ostracize you for your offense, there is no offense. Morality has not been internalized. The inner-directed character type appears to have arisen in the Renaissance and Reformation. Individuality becomes an ideal and authority resides in the individual’s conscience, although the latter is influenced by parents, teachers, and the clergy. The emphasis, however, is on assuming responsibility for one’s actions and to a lesser extent on forming one’s own conscience. The chief form of psychological control here is guilt. The other-directed character type can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but it comes to fruition in the twentieth century. A sense of individuality is retained but authority comes to rest in the peer group. The peer group sets aesthetical standards about image, taste, and consumption. Riesman observes that “All the morality is the group’s,” but the point of the peer group is to have fun.55 The individual’s goal is popularity and acceptance. The dominant form of psychological control is anxiety. Anxiety about being accepted, fitting in, and being popular. The highly individualistic outlook of peer

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group members is used to control them, for as Riesman shrewdly observes, the “membership is engaged in consuming itself . . . people and friendships are viewed as the greatest of all consumables.”56 Riesman debated whether conformity is more prevalent among the other-directed than the inner-directed. He claimed that conformity is the main mode of adaptation in any culture. But I think he failed to make his case for several reasons. The inner-directed type is a moral type with its emphasis on a moral conscience. The pressure to think for oneself in applying moral standards has a liberating potential. Jacques Ellul57 and Tzvetan Todorov58 regard moral judgment as the highest expression of human freedom insofar as one acts upon one’s beliefs without imposing them on others or feeling superior to them (moralism). The other-directed character type is an aesthetical one. Such a person examines every action, experience, and person in terms of pleasure and fun. In the desire to fit in, the other-directed person is chronically anxious about his relationships. The pressures for conformity here are as great as they are in an authoritarian family or society. Unless an inner-directed culture becomes authoritarian, the inner-directed person has a greater opportunity to resist conformity. Public opinion is reinforced and deepened by participation in the peer group. The aesthetical standards of the group are influenced by advertising and the media. The peer group is a conduit for public opinion. Working in concert, the peer group and public opinion impose a crushing conformity on the individual. Pluralism politicizes all relationships between individuals and between groups. The ensuing competition alters the working of public opinion and the peer group. We follow Kierkegaard’s profound analysis.59 In a time of moral dissolution, relationships between individuals become ambiguous as the interests of each party are in conflict and yet remain partially concealed. It is not polite to admit one’s selfish motives. This leaves the individual in a state of “reflective tension.” Passion can only be expressed by those whose relationship to others is inward—ethically qualitative. With the decline of inwardness and passion, one’s relationship to the other becomes concurrently that of aesthetic possibility and ethical indifference. As such the relationship must necessarily become abstract, the object of theoretical reasoning (reflection). Life in a “reflective age” assumes the characteristics of a game. When reflection is not accompanied by inward moral commitment, envy ensues. The powers of reflection are at the disposal of

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selfish desires. One envies others their possessions and their accomplishments. At this point Kierkegaard draws a startling conclusion about the modern reflective and passionless age: “Envy is the negative unifying principle.” The envy within the individual has its counterpart in the envious attitudes of others, and this collective envy is chiefly expressed through public opinion. When the envy that is present in reflection as aesthetic possibility is not accompanied by decision and action, it spills over into moral ressentiment. While ressentiment is universal, the modern form includes “leveling”—the belief that no one is better than anyone else. It is not enough to admire and envy the other: one must tear him down. To be effective, leveling must be done in concert with others; it is a collective phenomenon. Whereas it was once the province of a social class or occupation, in a reflective and passionless age leveling is accomplished by the public. The public is an abstraction in that the members do not interact with one another; its opinion must be expressed through the mass media. Because moral ressentiment involves leveling and because leveling is expressed through public opinion, public opinion both creates and is an expression of the “negative unity of the negative reciprocity of all individuals.” We can thus understand the tendency of the media, even more so today, to level every politician, movie star, and celebrity. The individual has become a “fractional part” of the public and as such delights in leveling. Public opinion expresses desire (positive up to the point of selfish envy) and ressentiment. Our pseudo-intimacy and pseudocheerfulness conceal envy and fear that can only safely be expressed in public opinion. The peer group too is a fractional part of the public; its unity is based in part on its ability to level and scapegoat outsiders. The hostility of the peer group, however, can readily be turned on anyone who fails to conform to its views. One’s status within the peer group is invariably uncertain. This accounts for the fear of isolation and “diffuse anxiety” Riesman discovered in the other-directed peer group. Even more than capitalistic competition, leveling is responsible for this anxiety. Indeed, envious reflection and leveling are behind the emergence of the other-directed character type. When all relationships become politicized, the individual seeks refuge in the peer group.60 As individuals are more fully enveloped in groups, the political competition between groups supercedes the competition between individuals. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that only individuals can

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act as moral agents and that the relationship between groups or organizations is basically selfish (political).61 Group success or survival is the exclusive goal. Survival (success) is the “moment of power.”62 With the disappearance of a common morality and the ascendancy of the group over the individual, equality becomes an equality of power. Dostoyevsky explored the implications of all relationships being turned into power relationships in Notes from Underground.63 In this novella, he dramatizes the master/slave logic of the modern world. The underground man lives in a world with three levels: superior, inferior, and equal. The unending competition for power rules out the possibility of equality. The individual or group whose goal is equality proves by this that it is inferior. Competition is only meaningful and pleasurable when it is between equals, however. As soon as one party wins, the sense of superiority disappears because the loser is now not equal. If the victor believes the loser is inferior, then superiority loses its meaning. Ironically, competition rules out the possibility of equality and turns everyone into a master (superior) or slave (inferior). The inferior is bitter and envious, while the superior is left with a hollow victory. An equality of power is chimerical. Only an equality based on love, in Dostoyevsky’s view, can result in true equality. An equality of love is based on respect, cooperation, and unselfish concern for the other. By contrast an equality of power is selfish and destructive. An equality of love would not permit the institutionalization of inequality as with global capitalism. In recent times a variation of the master/slave logic has emerged: the disingenuous celebration of the powerless. The argument goes something like this. The powerless, for example, women, minorities, the poor, are victims if not heroes. We admire their courage and perseverance; they desire to be equal. For only an equality of power confers dignity on the group. This attitude conceals deeper motives. We admire the powerless and support them as long as it does not infringe on our lifestyle and benefits. This view also unleashes the revenge motive: it is not enough to be equal, the powerless must overcome the powerful. But who can measure power? When has a group become more powerful than its competitor? In this view, a group should always refrain from claiming equality because it would lose its ideological advantage. Powerlessness is a virtue until one possesses power; thereupon it becomes a vice. An equality of power turns power into a value. In saying this I am not denying the terrible

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injustice done to women, minority groups, and the poor, but only pointing out the implications of approaching equality exclusively as an issue of power. At a recent conference on multiculturalism, a presenter claimed that men can’t understand women, whites can’t understand blacks, and so forth. She went on to say that she enjoyed humiliating male students in class because of what men have done and continue to do to women. Then she made a plea for equality. My response was that she had not given me any reason for giving up my power. If men and women live in mutually exclusive worlds and life is simply a struggle for power, then why should I as a man share my power with women? She didn’t realize that equality of power has no moral force beyond self-interest. The competition for power, left to itself, only leads to inequality.

EQUALITY AS UNIFORMITY

The ideology of cultural diversity runs up against the reality of cultural uniformity. As was indicated in the previous chapter, the postmodern diversity of religions, lifestyles, art forms, and interpretations is permitted and encouraged because it does not challenge the only real conformity—conformity to technology. The technological system makes use of cultural chaos to distract us from its domination and to better adapt us to its monolithic logic of efficiency. The other side of cultural equality as diversity is the equality of uniformity. Uniformity is principally achieved through statistics, for technology demands that every human attribute or property be measured and thus made equal so that only quantitative differences remain. The history of statistical measurement demonstrates its close connection to technology and later to science. From the thirteenth century onward, Western Europe began to measure an increasing number of phenomena. The union of abstract mathematics and practical measurement created the clock, the cannon, the crossbow, Portolano marine charts, double entry bookkeeping, and perspective painting. Underlying this approach to reality was the assumption of the uniformity of space and time that Descartes later articulated in his work on scientific method. This was only made possible by the desacralization of nature so that instead of living in a symbolic universe,

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humans lived exclusively in a material universe. As a consequence, humans depended more on sight (space) than on the spoken word (time). Alfred Crosby comments on the nexus between the visual image and measurement: Reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualize it on paper, or at least in your mind, be it the fluctuation of wool prices at the Champaign fairs or the course of Mars through the heavens, and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.64

The measurement of human existence gives rise to statistics. The word comes into English from the German in the eighteenth century and refers to scientific information that the political state acquires. Not necessarily numerical, as with the detailed description of a typical case, it quickly becomes so.65 In addition to government, business and industry began to require vast amounts of statistical information for the coordination of products, markets, employees, and citizens. Beginning in the early nineteenth century censuses, surveys, administrative data, accounting and actuarial data, opinion polls, market research, and examinations proliferated. Statistics were everywhere and had become numerical. The collection of statistical data created what Daniel Boorstin terms “statistical communities.”66 For instance, life insurance companies place smokers in a statistical community. A statistical community requires categories of course. To understand how statistical communities and statistical categories have supplanted moral communities and social categories we need to examine how the quantitative came to replace the qualitative and the normal supplant the moral. Human qualities cannot be measured. We attribute to and infer from human interaction certain qualities such as love. These qualities appear to arise from metaphorical or symbolic comparison (indirect meaning); moreover, qualities are both abstract and concrete. They have no empirical existence in themselves, for example, no one has ever seen love; but love resides in attitudes expressed and actions performed. Therefore we “observe” loving attitudes and loving actions, but not love itself. These qualities depend on context for their meaning. The meaning of love varies with history, culture, interpersonal, and personal contexts. No

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two people have exactly the same understanding of love, for neither has had identical experiences. The natural ambiguity of language permits us to use the same word for different contexts at the same time it allows us to understand in part a different context through dialogue. Two people, for instance, can explore what each means by the word “love” without fully understanding the other’s meaning. For true measurement to occur, one has to be measuring the same thing. But love is not a single phenomenon; it has as many meanings as contexts. Obviously a knowledge of context allows one to make an interpretation that is a better one than would have occurred without this knowledge, but still not be perfect or final. Consequently love can not be measured, but only partially understood in context. Yet social scientists, pollsters, and managers attempt to measure human qualities. The main reason we measure everything human is that the concept of normality has placed that of morality, or as Ian Hacking puts it, the concept of normal people replaced that of human nature.67 The traditional view of human nature was a moral one. Belief in a transcendent God or in natural law allowed humans to be defined according to an ideal or to virtues. Virtue was not based exclusively on public opinion, on average behavior. Even Aristotle’s idea of virtue as the golden mean could not be reduced to the statistical average. The concept of the normal arises from the wedding of science, medicine, and evolution. In short, science looks for scientific laws that could be expressed in statistical terms, whereas evolutionary thought, at least when joined with a belief in progress, argues that evolutionary development is represented in that which was most general (the statistical average). There have been three meanings of normal from the mid-nineteenth century. The first is that the normal is the typical. Originally a moral concept, typical was used in statistics to provide a detailed description of a single case that is perceived to be representative of the category. The second meaning of normal is that which is perfect; the third, the statistical average. When applied to health, the normal could refer either to the peak of health (perfection) or the absence of disease (average). There is no conflict between the second and third meanings of normal. If science discovers the statistical average, technology as applied science allows us to improve and perfect it.

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Insofar as the social sciences, including their application in marketing, education, and management, aspire to be scientific, they employ the idea of normal people (especially the average). From normal people come “human kinds.”68 This term is used to refer to some behavior characteristic of a category or kind. The social sciences, especially sociology, often studied and created statistically deviant kinds, such as child abuse, homosexuality, alcoholism, autism, teen pregnancy, and attention deficit disorder. These human kinds did not exist before the twentieth century even though the behavior did. To be scientific, the social sciences had to demonstrate that the behavior was deviant in a factual, statistical sense rather than a moral sense. Even traditional social categories, for example, age, sex, and social class, are readily transformed into statistical categories because they are operationalized for research purposes. Social class is often operationalized in terms of income, occupation, and education. Age and sex in one sense mean what they seem to mean; but again, taken out of their holistic, symbolic context they become variables. Statistics can even create social categories. The Bureau of the Census in the United States invented the category Hispanic for purposes of collecting official statistics. Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans, among others, quickly became Hispanics. Formal recognition of and rapid public acceptance of this category indirectly led to the formation of a Hispanic special-interest group in the political arena.69 Social scientists sometimes compound the problem by correlating social categories with the behavior of human kinds so that we may attempt to discover how much child abuse is explained statistically by class, sex, and age. Ultimately society becomes nothing more than a collection of statistical regularities and statistical categories. It makes little difference whether the category is a traditional one of social structure (age, sex, class) or a kind of person (child abuser, homeless) because the statistical category is the great equalizer—it strips the meaning from a social category and the individuality from a human kind. Society is statistical and so are the individuals who comprise it. With the triumph of statistics, the individual vanishes. First, the statistical category makes each individual equal in the possession of some trait or in the performance of an action. All the homeless are equal in being without a home. The meaning of the trait, behavior,

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or situation is not explored. In some instances, as with intelligence, we measure how much of a trait or characteristic one possesses, but all are equal in the possession of the same property. The normal is now an epiphenomenon of statistics, which when applied to human culture and the individual turns quality into quantity and imperialistically imposes the equality of standardization upon the individual and society. Behind this is technology, which demands a statistical equality for everything it encompasses. In order to create a technology one has to construct a logical process; every logical outcome is subject to measurement. Humans must be reduced to quantities, statistical categories and regularities; for that which is qualitative cannot be turned into a logical process or outcome. The ultimate purpose of statistical measurement is technical control. As Tocqueville noted the more citizens become alike, the easier it is to manage them.70 Examinations provide an apt example. The past century has seen an uninterrupted growth in the testing industry. No country makes greater use of standardized mental tests than the United States71 and most likely all other forms of tests. F. Allan Hanson distinguishes between authenticity tests that attempt to measure moral character, for example, lie detector tests and drug tests, and qualifying tests that claim to measure intelligence, acquired knowledge, personality, and vocational aptitude.72 The following remarks apply to qualifying tests and authenticity tests but in different ways. Hanson concludes that the two most important consequences of tests are that they define and produce the “concept of person” we require and that they maintain the person under “surveillance and domination.” We are turned into persons who are testable and thus controllable. Tests create persons in two primary ways. They change how we perceive ourselves and others. I come to regard myself as intelligent or stupid on the basis of my score on an intelligence test. Equally important, tests create the characteristics or properties they pretend to measure. Take intelligence, for example. Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated that intelligence cannot be measured.73 There is no empirical evidence that intelligence is a single property, and much to suggest the opposite. There are most likely multiple intelligences for abstract reasoning, visualization, emotional understanding, dialectical thought, creativity, and so forth. Hence, each kind of intelligence would need to be measured on a different test. But even

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more fundamental is the inability to measure quality. In a very real sense, every person’s various intelligences are unique, that is, part of the fabric of her entire life (context). Even the founder of intelligence tests, Alfred Binet, warned against the idea of ranking people in intelligence. Tests operate according to the principle of the selffulfilling prophecy. We define intelligence as a score on a test and by using this test as a gatekeeper for school and work make the original false definition come true. Tests keep us under surveillance and dominate us. There are tests to see if we have done our homework, if we can drive a car, if we have taken drugs, or lied about ourselves, and we submit to these tests and try to meet their expectations because we want the rewards of school, career, and promotion that are held out to us.74 Increasingly, both public and private organizations use assessment and accountability devices to measure performance and set goals for the future. Studies of these statistical management techniques indicate that most of the formal information, often statistical, collected by organizations as a basis for decision making can be criticized as follows: (1) it is too abstract, that is, it leaves out that which is qualitative and depends on context for its meaning; (2) it is too general if in the form of aggregate data; (3) it is sometimes unreliable, especially if it is only based on a guess; (4) it is sometimes politicized if the department, division or agency of origin senses the need to protect itself by inflating or deflating the data; (5) it is only convenient, that is, information and managerial techniques are often chosen because they are accessible to a timestrapped manager.75

Recall Zuboff ’s concept of anticipatory conformity. It applies to these management techniques. Employees sense they can not escape constant monitoring of performance and thus modify their actions to meet real or, in this instance, imaginary expectations. Even time has been totally reduced to the numerical. I am not talking about the clock and related devices, but rather the belief in the continuity of past, present, and future. Continuity is based on the assumption of homogeneity. Nothing radically new can occur, only accidental change. Temporal change can be measured only as repetition. It is Descartes’ idea of the extensiveness of space applied to time. This is behind the belief in progress, in the ability to forecast or even predict the future. Qualitative time is symbolic time based

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on the meaningful events that provide time with a narrative form but with an open future. Time and space and everything human must be subject to measurement, must become equal or uniform, to insure the efficient functioning of the technological system. Equality as group conformity and competition results in perpetual inequality and equality as uniformity results in the elimination of real diversity. The reality of equality represents an inversion of the ideology of equality. This contradiction has its impact upon discourse.

FREEDOM AND EQUALITY AS CHARISMATIC TERMS

Freedom and equality are now meaningless terms. When the reality of the quality a term signifies contradicts it, then the term loses common meaning and becomes a tool of power. Richard Weaver uses the phrase “charismatic terms” to denote terms that do not refer to anything in the real world. They have lost their “referential connections”; instead their use depends upon “common consent” or the “popular will,” which confers upon them charismatic authority. They become purely rhetorical terms. He suggests that politicians with the assistance of the media impose these terms on the public who more or less willingly accept them without reflecting on the appropriateness of their use. They have become the common coin of propaganda. If one were to expand his discussion to include advertising and public relations, the full range of propaganda would be included. The sad fact is that all organizations, private and public, employ propaganda to influence and control us. They are the unwitting agents of the technological system. Writing over 50 years ago, Weaver identifies freedom and democracy (equality) as today’s charismatic terms.76 If these terms have been severed from their referential contexts and yet ordinary people still invoke them as often as politicians and administrators, they must mean something. Indeed they have become irrational symbols. We can best understand the functioning and meaning of charismatic terms by comparing them to “plastic words.” This is Uwe Poerksen’s term for a category of words that aspire to be scientific or technical but end up amorphous in meaning.77 Plastic words go from being words in the vernacular to being scientific terms; but

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subsequently return to the vernacular. Science and technology, economics, administration, and the entire range of applied human sciences are the source of plastic words. He has identified 43 words as plastic words without pretending to having a definitive list. These words include: communication, development, education, function, future, growth, information, model, modernization, planning, progress, relationship, trend, and value. Plastic words are all abstract nouns and imply an aura of scientific factuality. As abstract nouns they destroy precise discourse, leaving behind the most general and hollow meaning. Like other abstractions, plastic words are elliptic sentences that imply a predicate. The plastic word “planning” implies a sentence like, “One plans for the future.” Abstractions sometimes turn predicates into substantives (nouns). The result is a world peopled with nouns, a material world closed to human intervention and human qualities. Plastic words as well contain “frozen judgments,” concealed under the aura of science. “Progress” and “development” seem factual and thus neutral, and appear to be a consequence of technological innovation. The frozen judgment here is that technology is our sole hope for the future. Plastic words are tacit symbols that stand for continued technological growth. Plastic words are used for propagandistic purposes. They manipulate us to embrace the torturing of the natural environment and to accept the fragmentation and stress technology imposes upon culture and personality. Plastic words “provide security and perform exorcisms.” Experts who talk plastic discourse “cast a spell” of calm in a world buffeted by permanent anxiety.78 If plastic words leave us under the aegis of experts, charismatic terms appear to leave us on our own. They are not owned by experts and flatter us that they are under our control. Charismatic terms are the necessary complement to plastic words. We want to have it both ways—a world in which expert advice rules and a world of democratic participation. So what do freedom and equality symbolize if only in an irrational or unconscious way? Charles Weingartner brilliantly concludes that both words symbolize “more.” “ ‘Freedom’ means more— more latitude in avoiding responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences; ‘rights’ means more—more, better, easier access to largely material comforts if not luxuries, and equality means more access, easier access, to the rights and freedoms that heretofore were

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privileges.” His argument is slightly oversimplified, but he is on target with his declaration of the basic American belief: “More is better.”79 In an interview Philip Rieff, when asked what Americans believe in, responded, “More.” Freedom and equality symbolize “more” and America symbolizes “more” to the rest of the world. Is it not obvious that “more” is the promise of technology?

CHAPTER 5

5 The Illusion of Freedom and Equality We are living an illusionary existence: The reality of our lives escapes us. We believe in freedom and equality but we have embraced servitude, homogeneity, and inequality. When reality becomes bleak and painful, momentary distraction and escape become preferable if not necessary. We are free and equal in our pursuit of banal pleasure. The semblance of freedom resides within the totalitarianism of the technological system. This is not a political or religious totalitarianism but a psychological one. Technological totalitarianism entails the technological control of the forms information assumes rather than the sheer amount of information we can choose from. The mass media, including the computer and the Internet, reduce knowledge to visual images on the one hand and abstract (atomized) words without real meaning on the other hand. These (visual images and atomized words) are the language of the technological system. Technology is first and foremost about the most powerful means of acting in the interest of efficiency and effectiveness. Technology is autonomous in regard to moral control. The visual images of the mass media to which language has been subordinated are only images of objects and power. Only when discourse forms culture can visual images be imbued with symbolic and ethical meaning. But today, as we have seen previously, discourse is subordinate to the visual images of the media. Autonomous visual images are about objects and their relations (power), how objects bring about the movement of other objects. Visual images make reality exclusively materialistic in imitation of science and technology. The relations between objects (products to consume) are relations of power: 94

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possession, consumption, manipulation, control and violence. A world devoid of common meaning and a common morality is a world of naked power. As Jacques Ellul noted, the media are anti-surrealistic; they remove meaning from life.1 Take, for instance, a man who initiates a hug with a woman. Is he expressing friendship (ethical love), sexual desire, or the attempt to manipulate her? Autonomous visual images rule out the first possibility; consequently, the image of a hug is either desire (power) or manipulation (power) or both. A technological society is a society of human manipulation. All psychological techniques are manipulative: their force is symbolic and irrational. They are forms of magic.2 Our tacit awareness of manipulation, reinforced by the generalized distrust of the other that flows from the eclipse of a common morality, produces widespread cynicism. Against this backdrop, is it any wonder that the “meaning” of a hug is power? The visual images of the media inure us to the manipulations of the techniques that we mutually employ. We thus accept life under the control of the technological system and normalize human relations based on fear and distrust. The psychological totalitarianism of the technological system is a consequence as well of the objectifying power of media images. Discourse leaves us free to imagine what the characters and their actions and feelings in a novel are like. Not that in reading a novel we visualize in detail a picture of each character and scene; but rather that we have a holistic, somewhat fuzzy “image” of them. This image was traditionally symbolic so that its meaning was related to the context of our lives. By contrast, when we view a movie we all have identical images. The movie objectifies the novel. On a much larger scale the media objectify and materialize our existence. The anonymous discourse of the media—sent by no one to anyone—reinforces our sense that this depersonalized reality is imposed on us. We are encapsulated in a totalitarian culture of propaganda, and our only weapon in the struggle for freedom, language, has been disabled. Consumer choice is set within this psychological totalitarianism and is largely dictated by advertising and public relations. Insofar as choice is the foundation of right, the proliferation of rights provides us with more choices. Rights are a compensation for our loss of freedom (in a strong sense) and the means by which we accept the demands of the technological system. But the expansion of

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rights to include desire clearly connects choice and right to technological possibility, which is really technological necessity. Choice, right, and possibility are all defined in relation to and determined by technology. Equality is related to technology in two principal ways. First, technology and its ally science inadvertently destroyed the experience of an objective morality, which led to the erosion of a common morality. This in turn created plural equality. Authority came to reside in public opinion and the peer group. Equality of the individual gave way to conformity to the peer group as a filter of public opinion. Competition between interest groups and organizations operates according to the master/slave logic so that competition can never lead to equality. Cultural and communicative equality are the diversity a technological system allows because they do not threaten the logic and movement of the system. The only important conformity is conformity to technical rationality and technical rules. The technological system permits superficial diversity as a cover for the statistical uniformity it imposes. Everyone is “free” to use her intelligence in the choice of lifestyle, occupation, and morality, as long as everyone has a unitary and identical kind of intelligence. Individual equality is homogenization, whereas group equality is the inequality that results from an unending competition for power. But finally, we are all equal in our inequality next to technology. I think it is rather obvious that the ideology of freedom and equality is present in virtually all political ideologies, both ethnic and national: It is a foundational ideology. As briefly mentioned in chapter 3, even among ethnic groups and nations that never previously emphasized freedom and equality, these values at the very least are negotiating chips in dealing with Western countries. Iran maintains that it has the right and should be free to enrich uranium for its nuclear plants. The United States, it claims, is against Iran having nuclear weapons because it does not want Iran to be a member of the “nuclear club,” to be on equal footing with the United States. One might object that Iran does not actually believe in the values of freedom and equality. But that is my point in referring to these values as ideological, not just in regard to Iran but in respect to all nations. The political, military, economic, and technological actions justified in the name of freedom and equality invariably exceed in the exercise of power the meaning of the terms.

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My intent was never to deny that freedom and equality have a political and economic context, but only to explain how politics and the economy depend on and are determined by the movement of the technological system. Because the values of freedom and equality had largely political and economic meanings in Enlightenment thought and in the various histories of Western societies, their technological context is concealed today. Moreover, freedom and equality are present in one way or another in the political pronouncements of ethnic and national groups today. The ideology of freedom and equality, as I have described it, is the necessary link between ethnic and national ideologies and the myth of technological utopianism. Ideology divides, myth unites. Ethnic and national groups use the ideology of freedom and equality for their own purposes in conflict and competition with other political groups. Yet all modern and modernizing societies subscribe to the myth of technological utopianism: they all believe in the promise of technological development. Apart from religious fundamentalism, political conflicts center on the acquisition of technical information, technology, and the economic power the former confer on their “clients.” The ideology of freedom and equality is the necessary link between political ideology and the myth of technological utopianism. The latter, I argued earlier, is comprised of four symbols: happiness, health, success, and survival. The former two are set within modern individualism, the latter two have a collectivistic cast. Consumer choice, including right and desire, is about the happiness and health of the individual. In other words, the perfection of the human body through consumption and technology. In the utopia, remember, we are completely happy, eternally youthful and healthy. Freedom is the right to make those choices that lead us to this blissful state. Plural equality is related to the success or survival of the group. Although technology represents the single most powerful means of success, it exacerbates the political tensions between all groups. The technological system is not totalitarian in a political or religious sense but in the psychological and statistical uniformity it imposes on us. Cultural, political, and religious diversity border on anarchy. Hence groups have to compete relentlessly for the “spoils” of technology. Plural equality is about the access to choices and rights that technology provides. The myth of technological utopianism and its constituent symbols are exclusively about power—the power of the consumer with

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his rights and the power of the special-interest group. The visual images of the media confirm this, for autonomous images are only images of power. The myth of technological utopianism is sterile, that is, without meaning. This nihilistic myth is a penumbra of the technological system. The power of the system is like alchemy—it tries to turn everything into the gold of meaning but leaves it base and leaden. The tragedy of the modern world is that all cultural, ethnic, and national groups are competing under the illusion of freedom and equality for power that resides in the technological system to which they are beholden. With our eyes on politics and global capitalism, we are distracted form our sorry state as “parasites” on the technological system.3 Freedom and equality have changed in meaning depending on the context of their definition. Freedom today involves little if any responsibility. Rights are now passive, that is, without responsibility and thus absolute. Freedom is at times negative—freedom from want, poverty, and so forth. Then it is positive in the form of consumer choice. But always without responsibility. Freedom is almost always perceived to be at odds with political authority, but not technological authority. Responsibility, freedom, and authority are in the technological system. Perhaps the most perceptive understanding of freedom is the overcoming of necessity as the resistance to but acceptance of authority. There is no freedom without authority, without something to contest, to struggle against. At the same time, however, authority can be overwhelming as with authoritarian control. The struggle with authority is what constitutes individual freedom, just as the acceptance of responsibility allows one to overcome the anarchy and selfishness of unfettered choice. Individual freedom emanates from the concurrent acceptance of and resistance to authority and the concomitant acceptance of individual responsibility but rejection of conformity. Because responsibility, freedom, and authority are exclusively centered in the technological system, we are, in effect, neutered. Technological authority is thus totalitarian. Equality can best be understood in relation to power on the one hand and to love on the other hand. When equality is defined exclusively as an equality of power, competition according to the master/slave logic ensues. As soon as one wins, the loser is not equal and consequently one’s enjoyment of power diminishes. The loser in turn resents the winner. Envy is, Kierkegaard understood, the

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negative principle of association for the crowd, the public. An equality of power can only produce inequality, disappointment, resentment, and envy. Those who deify an equality of power are tacitly advocating an exclusively aesthetical approach to power, the enjoyment of power, which, to paraphrase Kierkegaard again, can only result in an ethical indifference to others. The aesthetical approach (in its pure form) to life turns every action, event, and person into a source of personal enjoyment no matter what the consequences for others. Only an equality of love, a universal normative love, can create equality. This unselfish regard for each individual is universal. Each person is treated equally as the recipient of love. No one of course can live up to this ideal, but it is a check on power. Every moral virtue places some limitation on power, and in this sense contains the seed of the love of others. A moral community is built upon common interest but also common concern for others. The love of others depends on personal responsibility; it can not be institutionalized. An ethic of love can help restore the responsibility freedom entails. As Ellul maintains, love is the meaning of freedom at the same time it places limits on it, and only free people can love. To love another out of fear or conformity is a burlesque of love.4 The technological system turns all human relationships into relationships of power and imposes an exclusively aesthetical existence on us by turning us into consumers. By deconstructing language and a common morality, it destroys individual freedom as well. Like language, morality can be used to strip away freedom, but both are necessary for freedom. Moral judgment is the highest expression of freedom, moralism its greatest destroyer. Moral judgment, Todorov writes, involves taking some responsibility for the evil I perceive without feeling superior to those whose actions I oppose; it involves as well a willingness to act upon this judgment. Moralism entails judging the person not the act, feelings of superiority, a blindness to the evil that each of us does, and an unwillingness to act upon one’s judgment. Moralism represents an attempt to destroy the other, whereas moral judgment leaves open the offender’s return to the community. Moral judgment can be an expression of love, moralism can never be; it is always a form of violence.5 Freedom and equality no longer exist in any traditional sense. They are fundamental illusions that prevent us from perceiving the truth of our technological captivity. The individual, freedom, and

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equality (normative) are vanishing right before our eyes; we are left with their hollowed-out image. Everyone today demands the critic have a solution for the problems she exposes. Apparently one has no right to speak out against evil unless one possesses a short-term solution. Those who say or think this are only expressing a technological mind-set: For every problem there is a solution. But only technology provides solutions. I have no solution, certainly no short-term solution. Moral and political “problems” are intractable; they cannot be solved. An openness to one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise do not produce a solution, but only an opportunity for a temporary abatement of physical and psychological violence. History is not encouraging about solutions to moral and political problems; yet it offers examples of a temporary and partial resolution. All I can and am willing to do, then, is to sketch out a general course of action. A word of warning. Our situation today is unprecedented. For technology as a system is also our life-milieu. Our struggle is not merely against a political regime or a kind of economy but against the very organization of life in all modern and modernizing societies. Only those willing to face this shocking realization without escaping into illusion, only those willing to act with absolutely no possibility of a short-term victory, need consider my following remarks. I have no right to say very much anyway, for I, too, am more or less integrated into the technological system. In very general terms, we must concomitantly adopt a position of nonviolent anarchism (of the Left) and a position of cultural conservatism.6 Both positions, however, are to be situational not ideological. Anarchism as an ideology is unworkable. Anarchists fail to see that the issue of common meaning and control go together. Every real culture provides individuals with a meaning to life and that meaning is intimately involved in the control every culture exerts through its institutions. Humans fall apart without common meaning, but political, religious, economic, and technological control invariably exceeds what is necessary because the will to power is humankind’s greatest moral threat. Consequently, anarchism should be a situational response to authoritarian or totalitarian control. Only a nonviolent anarchism of the Left is appropriate, for it is premised on a normative equality of respect and regard for others. Libertarianism is merely another name for selfishness.

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Our situational anarchy must first be directed against all the psychological techniques of manipulation—the mass media, political propaganda, advertising, and public relations. There is the home of psychological totalitarianism. If we reject our culture of propaganda, we must likewise reject all interpersonal techniques of manipulation—the infinite array of self-help books on how to manipulate others. At the same time, we must reject the bureaucratic mind, the obedience to authority mind-set. Technology is the power of organization in the service of efficiency. All psychological and organizational techniques are used to facilitate our adjustment and conformity to technology. If we do not begin our resistance here, all our concern for the environment will be squandered. In rejecting the mass media, we will if only inadvertently be helping to restore discourse to its rightful place in society. The spoken word is the more important form of discourse because it is the result of and the cause of meaningful human interaction. It allows people to understand each other (up to a point), to reach agreement (at times), and establish common purpose (on occasion). It is also our only opportunity to be free. By its very nature discourse contains the potential for radical thought and action by the creation of new meanings. Our rejection of the technological system but not technology is only possible when humans free themselves from the psychological control of propaganda and reassert local control over discourse. It is a beginning, but not much more. The conservation of our cultural heritage is not to be uncritical. Most so-called conservatives failed to appreciate how capitalism and technology have both fragmented and made abstract traditional values. Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, often referred to as a conservative economist, demonstrated how capitalism undermined its supporting institutions like the family by subjecting previously normative relations to a pecuniary logic.7 Parents, for instance, would increasingly restrict the number of children they had because of an investment mentality. The same applies even more to the technological logic of efficiency. The values of the past are flawed values that were almost always compromised in the exercise of power. Yet common values are essential to what Edward Sapir called a “genuine” culture that sustains people materially and spiritually.8 Traditional values are not worthy of respect simply because they are traditional, but only on a case-by-case basis. Hence, we must reject conservatism as an ideology, for it deifies the past.

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These traditional values can at best be a rough guide to the future we can only anticipate in a hazy and distorted way, as in a glass darkly. We must reinvent or redefine values, such as freedom and equality, to apply to life under the technological regime and motivate us to transcend it. We cannot reject technology as such but only its embodiment in a system. We have to reassert human (moral) control over technology, but that necessarily involves the deconstruction of its characteristics as a system. We must be part anarchist, part conservative, but always realistic in rejecting the ideologies of anarchism and of conservatism. Ideology will only provide an illusionary escape from the totalitarian control of technology. From where will our motivation and inspiration come—humanism or religion? But are these not ideologies? Is this perhaps the meaning of freedom: to examine and eventually resist the incarnation of those beliefs that inspired us to seek freedom in the first place? And without freedom equality will only be another form of oppression.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. See Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 2. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 3. Patterson, Freedom, 3 – 4. 4. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: the Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 128. 5. Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal of the West, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Seabury Press, 1978) 45. 6. Ellul, Betrayal, ch. 1. 7. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) 3 –30. 8. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. T. J. Mayer (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969) 503 –06, 673. 10. W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVI (1955 – 56) 157 – 91. 11. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures in Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 12. Ricoeur, Lectures, 226. 13. Paul Ricoeur, “Science and Ideology” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 228. 14. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 15. Louis Dumont “The Anthropological Community and Ideology,” in Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 229.

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16. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, trans. J. F. Huntington (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). 17. Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). 18. Ricoeur, Lectures, 259. 19. Jacques Ellul, A Critique of the New Commonplaces, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1968) 3 –27.

CHAPTER 2: FREEDOM AND EQUALITY IN ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT AND AMERICAN HISTORY 1. J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 350, 475, 278. 2. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991) xiii. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Collier Books, 1966) 157. 4. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) 72. 5. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 30–31. 6. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 38. 7. Georges Duby, The Three Orders, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 8. Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 2. 9. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), viii; see also Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10. J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man, trans. H. F. Croes (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1960) ch. 2. 11. Luciene Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 12. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 19. 13. C. B. Macpherson, “Natural Rights in Hobbes and Locke,” in Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) 228 –33. 14. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) 239. 15. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 54 – 55. 16. MacIntyre, Ethics, 161. 17. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 239. 18. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 229 –38.

Notes

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

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Macpherson, “Natural Rights,” 231. Macpherson, “Natural Rights,” 232. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 237. Macpherson, “Natural Rights,” 231. Macpherson, “Natural Rights,” 231. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) ch. 1. Dumont, Mandeville to Marx, ch. 2. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 259 – 62. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 71– 72. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 255. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 261– 62. Todorov, Imperfect Garden, 66 – 67. Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness, trans. John Scott and Robert Zaretsky (University Park: Penn State Press, 2001) 29. Todorov, Imperfect Garden, 323. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976) 258. Todorov, Frail Happiness, 10, 64. MacIntyre, Ethics, 184. Todorov, Frail Happiness, 7 – 9. MacIntyre, Ethics, 184 – 85. Todorov, Frail Happiness, 21–30. MacIntyre, Ethics, 187 – 88. Todorov, Frail Happiness, 31– 53. Todorov, Frail Happiness, 56 – 66. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 36. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 37 –39. Becker, Declaration of Independence, 51. Thomas Campbell, Seven Theories of Human Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) 93. Dumont, Mandeville to Marx, 122–25. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) ch. 6. Quoted in Arthur Ekirch, The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1980) 51. Quoted in Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, 59. Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, 56. Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, 80– 82, 89. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1969) 340– 63. Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, 94 – 95. Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, 165 – 66. Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994) 28 –31.

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Ekirch, Decline of American Liberalism, ch. 18. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941). Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 42. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 4. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 46, 6. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 57 – 59. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, ch. 10. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 150– 73. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 345 – 46. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 471, 440. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) chs. 2–3. 67. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 271– 78. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

CHAPTER 3: FREEDOM AND EQUALITY AS THE MODERN IDEOLOGY 1. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage 1964) xxv. 2. Ellul, Technological Society, 73, 79 – 81. 3. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York: Seabury Press, 1975) ch. 3. 4. Jacques Ellul, What I Believe, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989) chaps. 8 –11. 5. Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980). 6. Jacques Ellul, Perspectives on Our Age, ed. Willem Vanderburg, rev. ed. (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004) 38. 7. Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic (New York: Continuum, 1999). 8. Ellul, Technological Society, chs. 1, 5. 9. Ellul, Perspectives on Our Age, 38 – 45. 10. Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994). 11. Ellul, Technological Society, ch. 5. 12. Ellul, Technological System. 13. Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 163. 14. Ellul, Technological System, 108 –17. 15. J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man, trans. H. F. Croes (New York: W. W. Norton Co., Inc., 1961) 161– 69. 16. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) ch. 10. 17. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, trans. J. F. Huntington (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).

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18. Tom Bottomore, Theories of Modern Capitalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985) ch. 2. 19. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 20. See Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Vintage, 1967), for a detailed discussion of technology’s hold on modern politics. 21. William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 22. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Knopf, 1965) 63. 23. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) 13. 24. Neil Harris, “The Drama of Consumer Desire,” in Yankee Enterprise, ed. Otto Mayr and Robert Post (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981) 192– 93. 25. Michael Miller, The Bon Marché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) 167. 26. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 167. 27. Daniel Boorstin The Americans: the Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1974) 128. 28. Boorstin, The Americans, 129. 29. On contemporary consumption, see Stivers, Culture of Cynicism, ch. 3. 30. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, (Abr. ed.; New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969) 46. 31. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 81. 32. Daniel Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents (New York: Random House, 1974) 26 – 42; Boorstin, The Americans, 137. 33. Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 4. 34. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) 211, 191. 35. Cited in William Beeman, “Freedom to Choose: Symbols and Values in American Advertising” in Symbolizing America, ed. Herve Varenne (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985) 52. 36. The following discussion extends the interpretation of formats that appears in William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Ihally, Social Communication in Advertising (New York: Metheun, 1986) 231 ff. 37. Orlando Patterson, “The American View of Freedom: What We Say; What We Mean,” David Riesman Lecture on American Society, Department of Sociology, Harvard University (October 31, 2000) 15. 38. Colin Campbell, “Romanticism and the Consumer Ethic,” Sociological Analysis 44 (1983): 288. 39. David Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 40. Stivers, Culture of Cynicism, 34 –38.

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41. Hugo Meier, “Technology and Democracy, 1800–1860,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March, 1957): 622–24. 42. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) 206. 43. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 363. 44. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983) paragraph 69. 45. See Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 4, for a fuller discussion. 46. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1958) 237 –38. 47. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control (New York: Scribner’s, 1993) 17. 48. Lawrence Friedman, The Horizontal Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) 57 – 59. 49. John Searle, “Social Ontology and Free Speech,” The Hedgehog Review 6 (Fall 2004): 55 – 66. 50. Searle, “Social Ontology,” 59 – 60. 51. Friedman, Horizontal Society, 56. 52. Cited in Friedman, Horizontal Society, 62. 53. Friedman, Horizontal Society, 59 – 60. 54. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2000) 12. 55. Friedman, Horizontal Society, 61. 56. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) 24. 57. Lawrence Friedman, The Republic of Choice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) ch. 5. 58. Friedman, Republic, 15 –17. 59. Herbert Kaufman, Red Tape (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1977) 7, 98. 60. Friedman, Republic, 193. 61. Friedman, Republic, 97. 62. John McKnight, “Professionalized Service and Disabling Help,” in Disabling Professions (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1978) 69 – 91. 63. Friedman, Republic, 40. 64. Friedman, Republic, 192. 65. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991) 136. 66. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 217 –19. 67. Ellul, The New Demons. 68. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) ch. 5; see also Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Viking, 1985) ch. 8.

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69. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) ch. 5. 70. Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 5; see also Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 71. Ellul, Technological System, 37. 72. J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 475 – 76. 73. J. H. van den Berg, Divided Existence and Complex Society (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1974). 74. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchus, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 75. Van den Berg, Divided Existence, 131–32. 76. Van den Berg, Changing Nature, 169 – 71. 77. Van den Berg, Changing Nature, 161– 69. 78. J. H. van den Berg, “What is Psychotherapy?” Humanitas (Winter 1971): 361– 64. 79. M. P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) ch. 3. 80. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1974) 90. 81. Jay Martin, Who Am I This Time? (New York: W. W. Norton Co., Inc., 1988) 219 –20; John Caughey, Imaginary Social Worlds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) ch. 2. 82. Charles Leroux, “Our Electronic Friends,” Chicago Tribune, 6 May, 2001, sec. 2, 1, 6. 83. Robert Kraut and Vicki Lundmark, “The Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?” American Psychologist 53 (1998): 1017 –31. 84. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1978). 85. Bill Wasik, “My Crowd,” Harper’s 312 (March 2006): 56 – 66. 86. Friedman, Horizontal Society, 225. 87. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) ch. 6. 88. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 89. Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 13 –18. 90. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) 546. 91. Auerbach, Mimesis, 551. 92. John Aldridge, The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 159; see also John Aldridge, Talents and Technicians (New York: Scribner’s 1992).

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Aldridge, American Novel, 146. Aldridge, Talents and Technicians, 30–35. Cecilia Tichi, “Video Novels,” Boston Review 12 (June 1987): 13. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991) 5 – 66. 97. Josephine Hendin, Vulnerable People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) chs. 1, 10. 98. Erich Kahler, The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (New York: George Braziller, 1967). 99. Jacob Brackman, The Put-On (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1971). 100. Kenneth Hudson, The Language of the Teenage Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1983) 22. 101. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda. 102. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976) 19 –22. 103. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 183 – 96. 104. Graff, Literature Against Itself, 55 – 59. 105. Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) 184. 106. Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) ch. 3. 107. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957) 53 – 57. 108. Patricia Hersch, A Tribe Apart (New York: Ballantine, 1998) ch. 5; see also James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 157 –175. 109. Christina Sommers, “Ethics Without Virtue,” The American Scholar 53 (Summer 1984): 381– 89. 93. 94. 95. 96.

CHAPTER 4: THE REALITY OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY 1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944) ch. 6. 2. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 4th ed. (New York: New American Library, 1985) 184, 202–212. 3. Galbraith, New Industrial State, 181– 93. 4. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Knopf, 1965) ch. 1. 5. Daniel Boorstin, “The Rhetoric of Democracy,” in Democracy and Its Discontents (New York: Random House, 1974) 26 – 42. 6. John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1995) 3. 7. Leslie Savan, The Sponsored Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) 1.

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8. Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, and Martin Stoller, High Visibility (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987) 278. 9. Stauber and Rampton, Toxic Sludge, 2, 13, 183. 10. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) 89 –164. 11. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 331. 12. See Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic (New York: Continuum, 1999) ch. 4. 13. Neil Postman, “The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar,” in Conscientious Objections (New York: Knopf, 1988) 66 – 71. 14. Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 1. 15. This phrase is from Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977) paragraph 69. 16. Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 4. 17. My argument about technological utopianism may appear to contradict what I said in the previous chapter about cultural fragmentation and meaninglessness. Consumerism is fragmentation at the level of practice, unity only at the level of abstraction. Furthermore, the “values” of technological utopianism are exclusively about power in all its forms: success, survival, happiness, and health. Power is not truly a value, for at a certain threshold power destroys values. Efficiency and consumption provide us with a superficial “false meaning” that cannot satisfy the human search for ultimate meaning and hope. I will explore this issue more in chapter 5. 18. Lawrence Friedman, The Republic of Choice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 74 – 79. 19. Philip Howard, The Death of Common Sense (New York: Random House, 1994) 166. 20. Friedman, Republic of Choice, 193 – 94. 21. Howard, Death of Common Sense, 63. 22. Howard, Death of Common Sense, 55 –110. 23. Abraham Blumberg, Criminal Justice (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970) ch. 5. 24. Howard, Death of Common Sense, 109; Friedman, Republic of Choice, 17. 25. Friedman, Republic of Choice, 15. 26. Henry Jacoby, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Eveline Kanes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) 154; see also Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994) 87 – 94. 27. Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1988) 346 – 51. 28. Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980) 209. 29. Ellul, Technological System, 209 –31, 216.

112

Notes

30. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964) 89. 31. Ellul, Technological System, 211. 32. Jacque Ellul, Violence, trans. Cecelia Kings (New York: Seabury Press, 1969) 120–21. 33. Stivers, Culture of Cynicism, ch. 7. 34. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 35. Richard Stivers, Shades of Loneliness (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) ch. 2. 36. Ellul, Technological System, 253 – 54. 37. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 38. Stivers, Culture of Cynicism, 140. 39. Hans Kelsen, Society and Nature (New York: Arno Press, 1974) 259. 40. John Aldridge, The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) ch. 1. 41. Jacques Ellul, “Symbolic Function, Technology and Society,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 1 (1978): 207 –18. 42. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) 148 – 54. 43. For a fuller discussion see Stivers, Technology as Magic, ch. 2. 44. Raymond Gozzi, New Words and a Changing American Culture (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990) 85 – 86, 60. 45. Ellul, Humiliation, ch. 1. 46. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1989) 65 – 72. 47. Ellul, Technological Bluff, 217 –20. 48. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Seabury, 1978) 16, 29. 49. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977); see also Stivers, Technology as Magic, chs. 1, 4, for an interpretation of communitas and anti-structure. 50. Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 51. Both Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969) and Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) had a nascent concept of the mass society in the 1830s and 1840s. 52. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part 4, chs. 2–3. 53. Tocqueville, Democracy, vol. I, part 2, ch. 7. 54. John Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1981) 18 –35.

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55. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, Abr. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969) 73. 56. Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 81. 57. Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). 58. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme (New York: Metropolitan, 1996). 59. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 64, 47, 52. 60. Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Vintage, 1967) 8 –24. 61. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1932). 62. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 227 –28. 63. This interpretation of Notes From Underground, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1961) is taken from Tzvetan Todorov, “Notes from the Underground,” in Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 72– 92. 64. Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 228, ch. 1. 65. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: the Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973) 167. 66. Boorstin, Americans, part three. 67. Ian Hacking, “Normal People” in Modes of Thought, ed. David Olson and Nancy Torrance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 59 – 61. 68. Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition, eds. Dan Sperbec, David Premack, and Ann Premack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 351– 83. 69. Paul Starr, “The Sociology of Official Statistics,” in The Politics of Numbers, eds. William Alonso and Paul Starr (New York: Russell Sage, 1987) 45. 70. Tocqueville, Democracy, vol. II, part 4, ch. 3. 71. Peter Sacks, Standardized Minds (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1999). 72. F. Allan Hanson, Testing, Testing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 73. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton Co., Inc., 1981). 74. Hanson, Testing, chs. 1, 10. 75. Stivers, Technology as Magic, 193. 76. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1985) 227 –32. 77. Uwe Poerksen, Plastic Words, trans. Jutta Mason and David Cayley (University Park: Penn State Press, 1995). 78. Poerksen, Plastic Words, 25 –26, 45 – 47, 88. 79. Charles Weingartner, “Three Little Words,” Et cetera 38 (Summer 1981): 148.

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CHAPTER 5: THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY 1. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) 140. 2. Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic (New York: Continuum, 1999). 3. Roderick Seidenberg, Anatomy of the Future (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) 83 – 85. 4. Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976) 206 –10. 5. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme (New York: Metropolitan, 1996) 179 – 93. 6. Much of the following discussion is taken from Jacques Ellul, Autopsy of Revolution, trans. Patricia Wolf (New York: Knopf, 1971) ch. 5. 7. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) chs. XI-XIV. 8. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” in Culture, Language and Personality, ed. David Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) 78 –119.

Index

abundance, 37, 40 advertising, 29, 37, 39 – 41, 45, 64 – 67, 74 – 75, 95 Aldridge, John, 55 anarchism, 100–102 anomie, 49 – 50. See also pluralism Aquinas, Thomas, 13 Aristotle, 87 Auerbach, Erich, 54 Baldwin, James, 27 Barfield, Owen, 59 Baumgartner, M. P., 50 Beattie, Ann, 55 Becker, Carl, 12, 22, 42 Bellow, Saul, 55 Bentham, Jeremy, 15, 35 Binet, Alfred, 70 Blumberg, Abraham, 70 Boorstin, Daniel, 38, 39, 51, 64 – 65, 86 Brzezinski, Zbignieu, 42 bureaucracy. See technology Burgess, Anthony, 46 Bush, George W., 1, 75 Campbell, Colin, 40 Canetti, Elias, 52, 79 Carver, Raymond, 55 collectivism, 7, 29, 33, 79 – 80 conservatism, 100–102 Constant, Benjamin, 15 consumption communities, 51

Cooper, Thomas, 40 Crosby, Alfred, 86 crowds, 52, 79 Debord, Guy, 41 deconstructionism, 59 – 61. See also postmodernism Descartes, René, 14, 85, 90 diversity. See pluralism Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 84 Dumont, Louis, 5, 6, 9, 17, 36, 48 Durkheim, Emile, 49 Dworkin, Ronald, 4 Eagleton, Terry, 54 Ekirch, Arthur, 24 Elias, Norbert, 3 Ellul, Jacques, 2– 4, 8, 11, 29, 31, 33, 36, 37, 65, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 95, 99 Febvre, Lucien, 14 Franklin, Benjamin, 40 Friedman, Lawrence, 42– 44, 53, 68 – 70 Fromm, Erich, 26 Gaddis, William, 55 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 63 Geertz, Clifford, 8 Gehlen, Arnold, 2, 34 Giddens, Anthony, 2

115

116

Index

Girard, René, 79 Gladney, Babette, 55 Gladney, Jack, 55 Gödel, Kurt, 61 Gould, Stephen Jay, 89 Gozzi, Raymond, 77 Graff, Gerald, 59 Habermas, Jurgen, 2 Hamilton, Alexander, 26 Hanson, F. Allan, 89 Heidegger, Martin, 2 Heller, Joseph, 55 Hempel, Amy, 55 Hendin, Josephine, 55 Herberg, Will, 74 hierarchy, 6, 9 –10, 48, 50 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 22, 61 holism, 6, 15, 22, 48. See also hierarchy Horkheimer, Max, 2 Horney, Karen, 58 Howard, Philip, 68 – 70 Hudson, Kenneth, 56 humanism, 18 –23 Hume, David, 15 Huntington, Samuel, 43 ideology, 5 –13; as dissimulation, 8 – 9; as distortion, 8 –10; as integration, 8, 10 individualism, 6, 15, 22, 29, 35, 79 – 80 Jackson, Andrew, 24, 27 Jefferson, Thomas, 24, 40 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 35 Juenger, Friedrich, 2 Kahler, Erich, 56 Kelsen, Hans, 75 Kierkegaard, Søren, 35, 77 – 78, 81– 83, 98 – 99 Kraut, Robert, 52 Kundera, Milan, 71

liberalism, 7, 15 –18, 22–23, 25 love, equality of, 84, 98 – 99 Lundmark, Vicki, 52 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 20 Macpherson, C. B., 18 majority: tyranny of, 18, 80; will of, 17 –18, 20–21, 23 Marchand, Roland, 41 Marcuse, Herbert, 2 Marx, Karl, 8 – 9, 19 –20, 36, 71 Marx, Leo, 41 mass media. See advertising, public relations, television meaninglessness. See nihilism morality: and the economy, 16 –20, 23; and politics, 16 –20, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 2 myth: compared to ideology, 11, 97; of technological utopianism, 29, 41, 66 – 68, 97 – 98 nature, state of, 15, 19 –20 Newton, Isaac, 22 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 83 nihilism, 53. See also postmodernism normality, 87 – 89. See also statistics Patterson, Orlando, 3, 12, 40 peer group, 80– 83 Phillips, Jayne Anne, 55 pluralism, 47 – 49, 53, 78, 82, 97 Poerksen, Uwe, 91 Polanyi, Karl, 23, 35, 63 Pole, J. R., 12, 26 –27, 47 Postman, Neil, 66 – 67 postmodernism, 53 – 62 Potter, David, 40 power, equality of, 51, 84 – 85, 98 – 99 propaganda: political, 37, 64; sociological, 37, 64 public opinion, 80, 82– 83. See also propaganda

Index

public relations, 29, 37, 45, 64 – 65, 75, 95. See also advertising Pynchon, Thomas, 55, 60 Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 10 Rieff, Philip, 93 Riesman, David, 81 Rifkin, Jeremy, 43 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14, 18 –24 Sapir, Edward, 101 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 73 Schumpeter, Joseph, 101 Searle, John, 42 Sinclair, Upton, 25 slavery, 12, 25 Smith, Adam, 15, 22–23, 36, 49 society, state of, 19 –20 Sommers, Christina, 61 Soysal, Yasemin, 43 statistical communities, 86 statistics, 85 – 91 technological fatalism, 72– 76 technology: and capitalism, 35 –36; as

117

milieu, 2, 31–32; and politics, 36 –37; as sacred, 30–31; as system, 2, 32–35, 72– 74, 97 – 99, 102 television programs, 67 – 68. See also advertising Tichi, Cecilia, 55 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6 – 7, 17, 25, 35, 80– 81, 89 Todorov, Tzvetan, 19, 21, 82, 99 totalitarianism, 94 – 95, 97 Turner, Victor, 79 uniformity. See statistics Van den Berg, 47, 49 virtual communities, 51– 52 Washington, George, 24 Wasik, Bill, 52 Weaver, Richard, 91 Weber, Max, 2, 8, 36, 43, 71 Weingartner, Charles, 92 Woolf, Virginia, 54 – 55 Zuboff, Shashana, 71, 90

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