IV. Aptitude

1.

Our subject is the present waste of human resources. Yet this waste is nothing new. Considering our wonderful faculties and powers, people on the average have never accomplished much. Regarded just as machines of virtue, pleasure, wisdom, battle, or friendship, we have always operated at a tiny fraction of capacity. This is evident if we contrast how people usually hang around with how people come across in emergencies, or when they are enthusiastic, or when they are calmly absorbed. Children find the average inactivity very painful and they nag, “What can I do? Tell me something to do.” Adolescents are restive hanging around, and they think up ways to make trouble. Adults are inured to it, and Schopenhauer claimed that boredom is a metaphysical attribute of the World as Will.

Psychologically, we define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something that he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just this chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t, you can’t make me.”)

Certainly a large part of our common wasteful inactivity is this neurosis of chronic boredom. Certain aims are forbidden and punishable, or unattainable and painful; so we inhibit them and put them out of mind. In a vicious circle, the repression then makes the idea of the aims seem threatening: the aims are now rejected also in ourselves. So we are bored and inactive. We see how boredom easily turns into apathy, the lack of incentive. (The next chapter, on Patriotism, will try to show that it is hard to grow up when the community lacks big incentives.)

At first this Sunday-afternoon neurosis, of lively children brought to a pause, is worse among the middle class than among the poor, for the middle class is less permissive, it has stricter standards to maintain and more expensive furniture to protect. But by adolescence it is generally evident in all classes of the young, hanging around, reading comic books, or watching TV. It is evident in their notion of what is acceptable behavior in their groups, in their sexual paranoia, in their inability to think up anything interesting. Their hearts are elsewhere and they don’t remember where. Many boys are afraid to be alone with themselves, because they might masturbate, which in itself may be an activity of boredom.

All this has long been with us, and formerly perhaps it was worse than it is now, for now there is more permissiveness for small children and more rationality about sexuality. In this chapter, however, I want to discuss another factor altogether: ineptitude, not knowing how; the situation in which, even if they know their aims, children don’t know the means or can’t manage the means. I propose that in this respect our present system is uniquely bad and getting worse. For ironically, just in our times, when science and technology are so advanced, this factor of ineptitude also increases, and children become practically more stupid.

2.

It is notorious that the physical plant and social environment have grown out of human scale. To achieve simple goods it is often necessary to set in motion immense masses. In scarcity, where the means are unavailable, we wistfully renounce the ends. In an abundant economy, there is a plethora of means of what a person doesn’t really want. Middle-class parents know from bitter experience that billions of dollars are spent annually for children’s toys and teen-age junk that are not really wanted and be idle. But furthermore, even if the end is desirable, the means often become so complicated that one is discouraged from starting out. For instance, it’s too complicated on a hot day to travel two hot hours to get to a cool place when so many others have had the same idea that it’s hot there too. To adults, such complicated means are irritating and take the joy out of life. To children growing up, they are disastrous because they make it impossible to learn by doing. The sense of causality is lost. Initiative is lost. And one ends with the idea that nothing can be changed.

We must remember that to children the city plan and social plan we present them with are like inevitable facts of nature. Unless they have architects or builders in the family, they cannot realize that the buildings were drawn by somebody on a piece of paper and could have been different. Unless their parents teach them otherwise, they believe that compulsory school attendance is a divine creation and it is a sin to be absent.

It is, of course, very difficult to judge the environment concretely from the child’s point of view. Thus, living in a big city does not as such make a child inept, though any city has very complicated means. The city is short on farm work, swimming holes, and animals to trap; but it has docks, freight-car yards, labyrinthine basements, pavements to chalk up, and subway trains to play tag on. The streets are littered with the remarkable junk of a thousand trades, to hoard and make things with. The ingenuity of New York ball games adapted to various improbable fields and obstacles is a model of rule making and rational debate that any senate might emulate: it sizes up the situation, argues, decides, and gets things done that work. The London Street Games compiled by Norman Douglas is no contemptible manual of traditional culture. History teaches that cities have made people smart because of their mixed peoples, mixed manners, and mixed learning. On the whole, cities have probably trained more intelligent children than the country. But we must remember, too, that until recently cities have been continually replenished from the country. City people had country cousins, and drew on both influences. There could be a powerful educative effect if a country boy came to the city and was exposed to bewildering new ways, or if a city boy visited the country and was exposed to space, woods, and cows.

3.

There is probably a point of complexity at which, cut off from the country, the city ceases to advance beyond country backwardness; it becomes impractical and begins to induce its own kind of stupefaction and ineptness. The endless city-spread of suburbs makes the real farming and open country unavailable. The city becomes the only world, getting duller as one leaves the center, through first the inner ring of blight and then the deadly dormitories and suburbs.

Within the big metropolises at present, industry and commerce are shut off and concealed. The freight yards go underground. Manufacture is in great walled plants on the outskirts. In New York, even the Hudson River and its ships are cut off by impassable through-highways, and stupid planning has provided a mile of child-useless landscaping, so that few kids get down to the river any more to fish. The newer high dwellings make the streets inaccessible to small children. The automobiles make the streets dangerous.

Also the streets are strange, because there is a loss of neighborhood. This is due not only to bad planning but to the greatly increased mobility of families. Children are torn from their school chums and this destroys culture. For instance, the street games and game songs that I remember, in New York 1911–1921, were the ancient London (Dublin?) games; and this tradition has now considerably faded. But it is not easily that a new child-tradition could develop, especially among minorities of various cultures. Quite the contrary, history and bad social planning have conspired to create in New York huge income and cultural ghettos—it makes no difference whether low-income or high-income; children of all classes are equally deprived of the human community. Whereas mixing sharpens intelligence, any segregated differences create prejudice and make people stupid.

The very space has been crushingly preempted. The cars in New York seem finally to have discouraged many of the ball games; we see boys going a mile to find a Sunday-deserted parking lot to play stickball which previously they played on their own street with the small children chosen in. With increasing traffic, the policing is more strict. In Los Angeles 40 per cent of the area will be swallowed up by the cloverleaves and express highways so that people can drive bumper to bumper in and out of Los Angeles! This is certainly out of human scale and is a dead loss for skating and bicycles. In Northern cities, the snow is never allowed to pile up; city sleighing is finished. The streamlined functional architecture is bare of useful stoops.

In brief, concealed technology, family mobility, loss of the country, loss of neighborhood tradition, and eating up of the play space have taken away the real environment. The city, under inevitable modern conditions, can no longer be dealt with practically by children.

Consider the dehumanizing complexity of the city just as a problem in municipal administration. In New York City “in charge of housing are many agencies, some for housing the poor, some for housing generally, some agents of the city, but others agents of the state and federal governments. They are, in part, the Housing Authority, the Mayor’s Commission on Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, the Comptroller’s Office, the Board of Estimate, the Bureau of Real Estate, the Department of Buildings, and the State and Federal Housing Agencies. Meantime, unco-ordinated with these, there are agencies in charge of location of schools (Board of Education), and playgrounds and parks (Parks). Transportation by rail falls to the Transit Authority, but if it is automotive it may fall to the Port Authority (for certain highways, tunnels, and bridges) or the Triborough Authority (for other highways, etc.). When cars are moving or parked in the streets they belong to the Traffic Department, and safety in general belongs to the Police. Nobody as such attends to the specific relation of workers and their particular industries, the cause of all this commuting, but there are zoning laws for broad kinds of occupancy, under the City Planning Commission. Neighborhood quarrels, family disruption, delinquency, etc., might be handled by the Police and various social agencies. Other departments, too, have a hand in the community planning of New York, e.g., Public Works; Gas, Water and Electricity; etc.

It seems reasonable to ask if the integration of these functions is not relevant? but nobody is in charge of that. To give a partial list: housing, slum clearance, location of industries, adequate schools and teachers, transportation, clear streets, traffic control, social work, racial harmony, master planning, recreation. The list could be long extended, not to speak of a beautiful city and local pride. A part from such a unified view, the solution of this or that isolated problem inevitably leads to disruption elsewhere. Escape thoroughfares must aggravate central traffic. Slum clearance as an isolated policy must aggravate class stratification and delinquency. New subways aggravate conurbation. “Housing” makes for double-shift and overcrowded classrooms. No master plan guarantees foolishness like the Lincoln Square project. These consequent evils produce new evils among them.…

(Communitas, Appendix D.)

Even so, confusing as these factors are and much as they cut down the available child-games and child-objects, it is hard to know what things look like from the child’s-eye view. For instance, the new public housing seems after a few years to swarm like any old-fashioned slum and is perhaps developing its own worth-while child culture. At first, active boys shunned the official playgrounds, but now, driven by necessity, they have agreed to take them over and turn them to their own uses, games, adventure, necking, and battle.

4.

My guess is that, in city, suburb, and small town, the chief unambiguously retarding influence of the complicated technology acts on the children through the ineptitude of the grownups—just as the stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.

People use machines that they do not understand and cannot repair. For instance, the electric motors: one cannot imagine anything more beautiful and educative than such motors, yet there may be three or four in a house, cased and out of sight; and when they blow they are taken away to be repaired. Their influence is then retarding, for what the child sees is that competence does not exist in ordinary people, but in the system of interlocking specialties. This is unavailable to the child, it is too abstract. Children go shopping with Mama; but supermarket shopping for cellophane packages is less knowledgeable and bargainable than the older shopping, as well as providing tasteless Texas fruit and vegetables bred for nonperishability and appearance rather than for eating. Cooking is more prefabricated. Few clothes are sewn. Fire and heat are not made. Among poor people there used to be more sweated domestic industry, which didn’t do the adults any good but taught something to small children. Now, on the contrary, the man and perhaps the woman of the house work in distant offices and factories, increasingly on parts and processes that don’t mean anything to a child. A child might not even know what work his daddy does. Shop talk will be, almost invariably, griping about interpersonal relations. If the kid has less confidence that he can make or fix anything, his parents can’t either; and what they do work at is beyond his grasp.

Parents, especially fathers, feel that this way of life offers too little to their children, especially the sons. They and to blame it on the city—just as many dog lovers will not keep dogs in the city. Some guiltily give the kids more money to go to the movies. Others choose the suburbs, where they can putter and fix, even though they thereby limit their own lives in other ways. We must return to the meaning of this fateful move.

5.

Let me give a dismal illustration of the case at its worst. At an underprivileged school in Harlem, they used to test the intelligence of all the children at two-year intervals. They found that every two years each advancing class came out ten points lower in “native intelligence.” That is, the combined efforts of home influencing and school education, a powerful combination, succeeded in making the children significantly stupider year by year; if they had a few more years of compulsory home ties and compulsory education, all would end up as gibbering idiots. In this same school a new principal, with a better staff, more personal attention to the kids, and more progressive methods—and also willing to give his own time for social work among the parents—has reversed the trend. One method to remedy stupidity that he swears by is to invite the free expression of criticism and hostility, e.g., “Write a composition telling why you hate your father—why you hate school—why you hate me.”

6.

It was just to this deepening crisis of boredom, lack of personal engagement, cultural irrelevance, and ineptitude, in conditions of mass industry and mass education, that the movement called progressive education addressed itself. It is now moribund, but it can be revived. Its history in our century, however, is immensely instructive.

The pragmatism, instrumentalism, and technologism of James, Dewey, and Veblen were leveled against the abuses and ideals of the then dominant class: the Four Hundred and the Robber Barons—academic culture, caste morals and formal religion, unsocial greed. The philosophers were concerned about abundant production, social harmony, practical virtues, and more honest perception and feeling, which would presumably pertain to the rising group of technicians, social-scientific administrators, and organized labor. (As a symbol of the “leisure-class culture” that they were attacking, they chose the “classical” culture of Greece, founded on slavery.) In that early turn of the century, these philosophers failed to predict that precisely with the success of the managers, technicians, and organized labor, the “achieved” values of efficient abundant production, social harmony, and one popular culture would produce even more devastatingly the things they did not want: an abstract and inhuman physical environment, a useless economy, a caste system, a dangerous conformity, a trivial and sensational leisure. (So that now we tend to think of the Greek polis as an “integral community,” making a public use of leisure and having a perfected education of the whole man, whereas we have fragments.)

Yet midway in this transition from the old tycoon-and-clergyman culture to the new managerial organization, there was crystallized a practical method of education with the defects of neither extreme (and in many ways strangely like Greek education); and it was given a sounding board especially by the daring Twenties. Progressive education drew on every radical idea since the middle of the eighteenth century, in pedagogy, politics, socialist and communitarian theory, epistemology, esthetics, anthropology, and psychiatry. It was as if progressive education resolved that in the education of the children there should be no missed revolutions and no unfinished situations.

In its heyday, progressive education was not sectarian. Different schools laid the emphasis in different places—Dewey was more experimental, Russell more rational, Neill more sex-reformist, the people around Goddard and Antioch more communitarian, Beera more “handicrafts,” Black Mountain more “creative,” Muste and Fincke more political-economical, and so forth. But I think that almost all schools would have accepted, in varying degrees, all of the following positions:

To learn theory by experiment and doing.

To learn belonging by participation and self-rule.

Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression.

Emphasis on individual differences.

Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics.

Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.

Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting.

Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.

Community of youth and adults, minimizing “authority.”

Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community.

Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems of wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city).

Trying for functional interrelation of activities.

This is not a perfect educational program. It lacks grandeur and explosive playfulness. It lacks religious quiet. And it is weak in the models of the humanities. But there cannot be a “perfect” educational system, for each system must meet its social situation. In a period like ours, of transition, uprootedness, inhuman scale, technical abstractness, affectlessness, and conformity, no lesser program is seriously conservative of human resources. Our official public educators are not serious in their concern for human resources, or they would use this program.

There has always been one criticism of progressive education that must be answered, namely, that it is weak in curriculum, in cultural and scientific content. I think this is a misunderstanding. There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture. (Cf. Appendix D, page 256.) This philosophic content fans out as speech, as finding where you are in space and time, as measuring and structuring, and being a social animal. It may be called English, geography and history, arithmetic, music and physical training; or Greek, history, logic, and Rugby; or trivium and quadrivium (plus games); or literature, social studies, science, and eurythmics. It is the same basic curriculum; the differences are in method, and they concern how to teach the curriculum and make it second nature to the students, unblocking rather than encumbering, and bringing out the best. The curriculum is only superficially what “a man ought to know”; it is more fundamentally how to become a man-in-the-world. The method must vary with what good or bad habits and powers the young have come with in various situations. The curriculum certainly cannot vary with what is temporarily convenient for a bad society (the definition of a bad society being one that is not educational). Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.

For instance, in our present Cold War debate about teaching science, Dr. Kvaraceus, the National Education Association’s expert on delinquency, warns us that geometry is “too hard” for most, and that to insist on it for all will produce failure and truancy. But this is not the progressive educator’s way of looking at it. Is it that geometry is too hard, or that the aim of teaching is not bona fide, being rapid technical know-how rather than humane understanding? Is it that the method is irrelevant to the aptitude and ineptitude that the children have come with? What dismays me in thinking like that of Dr. Kvaraceus is that it disregards our duty to geometry as such as a worth-while human object, our duty to Euclid, Kepler, and Einstein. The result of his attitude is that these champions will not be champions for all men. We are in a sad dilemma if, as is the case, kids don’t learn because it is not humanly worth while to learn, they have no deep motivation; and then, to keep them in school we have to cut down on the few subjects that are humanly worth while. The question cannot be whether to teach science or to whom, for what is man without science? but how to teach it in various circumstances.

At the other pole from Dr. Kvaraceus, the recent public alarm about Sputnik has led to Dr. Conant’s quasi-official and vastly circulated reports on the high schools. But because the concern is not serious but is simply fear of the Russians, the reports show such little pedagogic imagination that they are a minor national disaster. Dr. Conant’s philosophy is expressed in the sentence:

Attention has been centered for so long on the individuality of each child that [educators] resist any idea that a new national concern [defense against Russia] might be an important factor in planning a high school program. [From The Child, the Parent, and the State.]

What an extraordinary thought, that there could be a conflict between the unfolding individuality and the achievement of habits of science! When Dr. Conant proposes that the bright upper fraction of the students be somehow induced to take hard programs—for everywhere large percentages of the brightest shirk the hard courses or quit school—he does not ask what is at present lacking in their motivation. He objects to treating education in a vacuum, but he treats our national needs in a vacuum. Will the incentive to fight an atomic war, or a Cold War, match the social apathy and cynicism of these boys? More important, Dr. Conant does not seem to wonder why there are so few (15 per cent) who are “academically talented.” Does he think that the general dullness of the high school population has occurred in a void? Contrast a remark on the same subject by the Dean of Teachers College, John Fischer: “I have a strong suspicion that we have learned little about the abilities of human beings. I suspect they are greater than most people assume.” If one is concerned about conserving human resources, this would seem to be the obvious first approach: to find why most are so inept and to invent techniques to unblock them, to increase the pool of the “academically talented.” Perhaps the conventional school itself is not such a good idea, especially if the “national need” is for creative scientists; for at the point in their careers at which these boys are tested (say ages twelve to fifteen), the “brightness” of the 15 per cent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

If these are the important kinds of issues—motivation, unblocking ability, deep-rootedness of learning—a little more attention to the individuality of the child, and some more progressive education, might suit the national need. It might even speed up the invention of rockets.

(The nadir of the recent pedagogic wisdom is, I suppose, the logic of our fierce Dr. Edward Teller of Berkeley. If the Russians continue to outpace us, he informs us, they will land on the moon first, they will control weather, perfect irresistible weapons, lead the world in everything, and “then freedom will be lost here and everywhere.” Yet a couple of paragraphs later we learn that “in science anybody’s success is your success … scientific people can, and do, co-operate no matter what their nationalities are,” they speak an international language, and they belong to an international community “who practice the brotherhood of man.” “A healthy sign,” rejoices Dr. Teller, “is that salaries for scientists are edging upward”; the universities, private research laboratories, industrial concerns and the government “assure to scientists a comfortable, secure life.” “Not,” however, “that money should be a factor in deciding on a scientific career,” for the Professor’s concluding theme is that “science is fun.” The essay, “Should You Be a Scientist?” appeared as a public service advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Life, and Scholastic magazines.)

7.

The revolutionary program of progressive education missed out, or I should not be writing this gloomy book. The most vocal and superficial objections to it came from the conservatives who said that it flouted the Western Tradition, the Judeo-Christian Tradition, the Three R’s, Moral Decency, Patriotism, and the Respect for Authority. But the damaging, and indeed fatal, blows to progressive education have come from those timid within the movement itself, who feared that the training did not provide an easy adjustment to life, meaning by “life” taking one’s role in the organized system. This opinion has gradually prevailed, and now the doctrines of progressive education that have made headway in the public schools are precisely learning to get along with people, tolerance, and “real life problems” such as auto driving and social dancing. They are not those that pertain to passionately testing the environment rather that “adjusting” to it. What would one expect? There is nothing special about the failure of progressive education to make its way; it has suffered the same compromises as twenty other revolutions that I shall list in this book. The dominant class in society sees to it that it gets likewise the “progressive education” that suits.

8.

Let us return to the thread of our argument. Besides the out-of-scale physical environment and its complicated techniques, the social environment too is baffling and produces ineptitude and loss of the sense of causality.

Think of a child trying to cope with Property Rights, a most abstract notion. There is no problem when it is a case of something being used by somebody else, when Jack tries to take Bobby’s shovel out of his hand and Bobby clouts him over the head with it or complains to authority in no uncertain terms. The puzzlement comes when the shovel is idle and Mama says, “You mustn’t use that shovel, it’s Bobby’s.” What impresses the child is no precise idea, but the grownup’s tone of conviction. The child “believes,” though there is no evidence of his senses. It is the beginning of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities. What is sickening is that it is just this kind of influencing that is wanted by priests, mayors, and tavern philosophers who declare that more home influence is the remedy for our troubles of youth.

But the social relationships of the grownups themselves are out of human scale, for in the corporate system of organization the puzzling has become altogether mysterious. It is disturbing to a child to sense that his mother is under the unseen thumb of religion or his father of the boss. But the top managers in our semimonopolies are quite anonymous. This is part of the new managerial code, as described by Fortune itself. A child cannot use them as model heroes, for they are invisible. This is why Jackie Robinson’s proposal to import the TV personalities as ersatz models is so unfortunate, for these visible “heroes” are puppets. With the increasing concentration of management and control, as A. A. Berle has pointed out, there is less relation even to Property Rights.

Consider it. If one is put upon or abused, with whom shall he be angry? One cannot vent rage against an abstract system. But there is no need to vent feeling, for it is a matter of the grievance committee and other regular channels. In the Middle Status, the heart of the organized system, the situation is not the same as in a bureaucracy, with which it is usually compared; for a bureaucracy has a written code and a definite pecking-order; but the organization protects everybody’s personal dignity, and its subtle interpersonal feuding and competition cannot be codified, for it is without any objective utility to give a principle. Even that mighty system the State is more material: it has banners, soldiers, elections, postmen, police. In a child it rouses awe and fear. But the organized system exists only in the bland front of its brand-name products and advertising. There is no knowing how it is run or who determines.

It is in these circumstances that young persons grow up convinced that everything is done with mirrors, by “influence.” Not even the personal influence of nepotism, but something more like the astrological influence of the planets. The sense of initiative, causality, skill has been discouraged. Merit is a trait of “personality.” Learning is the possession of a Diploma. Usefulness is a Union Card. Justification is Belonging.

9.

We are now in a position to understand the Hipster as Role Player.

The Role Player is the fellow who, without any real aptitude or training to do anything, and without a commitment to any goal, can skillfully fit the expectations that people have of him, and give typical performances to prove that he can do the job. The Roles of society are the capitalized nouns in Time style, e.g., Philosopher Russell or Very Important Person. There are great advantages in being a hipster in this sense. First, it is a way of getting by. If a man feels that he is not anything, he is at least taken for something, and he belongs. Then he can feel contempt for the others because they are fools, they are taken in; and so he satisfies his spite. And he can feel more confident that the so-called worth-while aims are empty because he can give a token performance, and this calms his own gnawing feelings of frustration and worthlessness. Finally, Role Playing protects a deep conceit of one’s abstract powers: one “could” if one wanted, but in fact is never tested. The hipster in this sense must be distinguished from the industrious confidence man who wants to get the swag and vanish, and does not thrive on publicity. The hipster will often boast: he knows the score, he is ahead of the game.

This cool attitude of the hipster is endemic in the organized system. But on the other hand, the committed Organization Man also really belongs, he has status and salary and must protect them. Therefore the junior executive is in a terrible contradiction. He is cynical about the aims of the firm, yet he fears that his own ineptitude will be found out. He has no recourse to concrete performance, for there is little contact with unambiguous material and there are no objective standards. How to meet a purely subjective demand? In pain (even ulcers) he has to get by by role playing, interpersonal relations abstracted from both animal desire or tangible achievement. He meets expectations, he conforms, he one-ups, he proves he must know how by attaining a higher status.

“The trainee,” says William H. Whyte, Jr., “believes managing is an end in itself—technique is more vital than content.” Compare the identical remark in a memorandum of the Liberal Project in Congress: The past few years “have given rise to a particular brand of politician. He is completely method-oriented. The substance of a bill is not important, it is rather the process of passing the bill that is paramount.” The new-type salesman does not sell the product but the man: by the expense account he proves that he is a right guy and he confirms the buyer’s image of himself, whatever that happens to be.

For many bright young fellows, I think, the Organization has taken the place that the Communist Party had in the Thirties. At that time young men who were frustrated in their creative lives, perhaps because unable to stand the gaff, took out their self-hatred on the capitalist system, and often with sublime self-contempt accepted jobs with high salaries. In our decade, the young men believe they belong to the governing board, and their resentment has turned to cynicism. The standard of human integrity is equivalent.

The type situation of Role Playing is the Air Force questionnaire asking who is Giotto or Vivaldi: if the candidate gives the right answer, he is disqualified, he will not belong. The Role Player has no difficulty.

I was recently at another convention (National Recreation Congress, 1959), and striking was the difference between the working stiffs, the actual directors of play and group activities, and the administrators. The actual directors were human beings, often enthusiastic and proud of happy improvizations and strokes of good judgment that they wanted to report. But the administrators were concerned about standards, certificates, avoiding complaints and offending, and proving their dedicated service; it was clear that they wanted above all to diminish the factor of risk for themselves and create a front to get bigger appropriations. At the same time they kept asking how to recruit Leaders; but it was evident that the more strictly they applied their standards, the more surely they would eliminate the leaders.

We must contrast the concept of Role, meeting expectations by playing it cool and knowing the technique for a token performance, with the concept of Identity that Harold Rosenberg so well describes in The Tradition of the New. One discovers, fights for, appoints oneself to one’s Identity. Identity is defined by its task, mission, product; role depends on the interpersonal expectation of the others.

Naturally, statesmen and public spokesmen are the role players, hipsters, par excellence. They exist by Front and giving symbolic satisfaction, so it is not to be hoped that their speech be serious, relevant to what objectively exists. But it is dismaying to find the same symbolic relations in enterprises of production and the distribution of goods. One cannot help distrusting the goods, thinking they are only packages and brand names. And so, becoming disaffected from these enterprises, the Beat Generation sometimes comes to despise real goods. It takes goods to be merely commodities that must be spurned: this is the fetishism of commodities in reverse.

Let us sum up. The factory operatives who couldn’t care less about their jobs are not much aware of what they produce; causality is built into the machinery. The junior executives, advertising men, salesmen are role players and have little causal relation to the products. Presumably the technicians and top managers know something about and produce the products, since the products do come to exist. And the evidence is that the top managers do work very hard on production and sales; they work a sixty-hour week and are proud of their work. But even they have to devote an increasing majority of their time to interpersonal games of no productive use—90 per cent, says one, mentioned by W. H. Whyte, Jr.

(Let me give a typical illustration. There is a well-known monthly magazine that five editors used to put out with a week’s work. It was pretty good. Unfortunately it made a reputation for itself and its wealthy sponsors hired a staff of ten secretaries and assistants to the editors. Soon the editors found themselves working all month, and quit. The magazine lost all its spark.)

Considering the technical possibilities, we must say that our physical environment changes very slowly. This is not surprising, for so little thought is given to it.

10.

We have in America a mystique of “production” and a man engaged in “production” is highly esteemed. In The Affluent Society, J. K. Galbraith shows that this attitude is entirely specious. Of five ways in which production can be increased: (1) except in wartime we do not try to increase the labor supply; (2) we do not try to encourage new enterprises; (3) in most industries, we do not try for technological innovation. All the stress is laid on (4) full employment, and (5) efficient use of present capital.

But this economist does not even bother to mention the factor of productivity that concerns us here: (6) to increase the aptitude and skill of each lad. Indeed, as we have tried to show, rather than encouraged it is systematically retarded. It would not today be said, as it used to be, that the Americans are born mechanics. Among the model heroes of the young we do not think of Edison, Burbank, Ford, Steinmetz, and so forth. It is anachronistic to mention their names.

The juvenile literary and pictorial image of the inventor and scientist has correspondingly changed. Two generations ago it was a kindly bumbling old fool, unkempt but stubborn and brave, and with a light of divine truth in his eyes. A generation ago science began to be altogether strange and the scientist began to be a surgeon with rubber gloves or a cold maniac with diabolic power in his eyes. But this stereotype is forbidden today, for strategic reasons, and the scientist is now a young, neatly dressed, cooperative Organization Man holding up some apparatus that proves his role, but nothing in his eyes at all, at all. But he is having fun.

The claim of the organized system is that research and invention are in their nature increasingly corporative and anonymous, and this produces great results. That is debatable. I doubt that very much is corporatively invented which is not pretty directly dictated by managerial need and policy, whereas the essence of invention is to be hitherto-unthought-of—though, of course, there occurs the rich comedy of administrators anxiously waiting for mathematicians to turn up with something “useful,” and never knowing what goes on behind those spectacles. (I have a mathematician friend who bills his firm for overtime because he tends to think of things in bed about 2 A.M. and his attitude is that they can take it or leave it.) Certainly the following example is not untypical: A gifted food chemist puts in six months developing a formula; he is successful and the product is going to be pushed with a million-dollar campaign; it is, in his opinion, identical with—Mayonnaise, the popular brand. (In this case the scientist suddenly decided to quit and to set himself up as an independent consultant, hoping that people would come in with real problems.)

Proof on this kind of issue is difficult. On the one side, the corporations, having preempted much of the talent, point proudly to inventions made under their auspices, as if they might not have been made anyway. On the other side, their opponents argue from inventions-that-have-not-been-made, a peculiar metaphysical category, e.g., “If all the capital and research had not gone into internal combustion engines, by now we should have much superior steam or electric cars.” It may be said definitely that research entailing million-dollar equipment and vast samplings of the populace cannot be carried on without corporative or state sponsorship; yet many would deny that this style of research, and expense of social wealth, is so fruitful as the old American shoestring operator or the seventeenth-century gentleman-philosopher with his dumb-bunny apparatus and towering intellect. We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least, hard-working though they may be. Also, inventions made outside the organization are notoriously bought up and withheld or otherwise sabotaged by the organization. (To my conscience, this practice, of keeping basic new ideas in limbo until it is profitable to exploit them, is immoral and disruptive of the community of mankind far more than rigged quiz shows, but it comes from the same box, whose label is Intellect Bought.)

So we return to the President of Merck and Company, who, hauled before a Senate investigation on charges that Merck and its semimonopolistic “competitors” were criminally overpricing drugs, warned the Senators that they might “upset the delicate balance we have been able to develop over the years between the quest for scientific knowledge on the one hand and the drive for financial success on the other.”!! Quo usque tandem.

The situation of a young fellow is ironical. If he has reached college age and has technical aptitude, the most desperate attempts are made to get him for this or that firm. They pay for his schooling and guarantee him a job. Meantime, the systematic behavior of those firms has been to baffle aptitude in the young and to limit it where it has survived.

It is in this context that we must listen to Dr. Conant’s recommendations for the high school: the selection of the academically talented, the top 15 per cent, to major in a program of mathematics and sciences. No effort is made to increase the pool of ability; and the public schools are, effectually, to be used as apprentice training grounds for the monopolies and the armed forces.