New Reformation : Notes of a Neolithic Conservative - Softcover

Goodman, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604860561 ISBN 13: 9781604860566

Publisher: PM PRESS, 2010

Synopsis

Paul Goodman set the agenda for the Youth Movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd. Under the view that the 1970s presented a moral and spiritual upheaval comparable to the Protestant Reformation, he continued to guide his avid readers. Michael Fisher's introduction situates Goodman in his era and traces the development of his characteristic insights, now common wisdom in the radical critique of Western society.

About this title

About the Authors

Paul Goodman, known in his day as "the philosopher of the New Left," set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s with his bestselling Growing Up Absurd. He produced new books every year throughout that turbulent decade, while lecturing to hundreds of audiences on the nation's campuses, covering subjects that ranged from movement politics to education and community planning, from psychotherapy and religion to literature and media. At the same time, a continuous stream of poems, plays, and fiction prompted composer and diarist Ned Rorem to say, "In a society increasingly specialized, he shone as a Renaissance artist." America's most celebrated public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972, his work still resonates for our own times of national crisis.

In his probing introduction to New Reformation, cultural and intellectual historian Michael C. Fisher speaks for a new generation of young scholars still in their twenties, as he assesses the initial impact and continuing relevance of Goodman's problematic love affair with the radical youth of the Sixties. Fisher wrote his honors thesis on Goodman as an undergraduate at the University California at Davis, and is currently in his second year of doctoral studies in history at the University of Rochester.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

New Reformation

Notes of a Neolithic Conservative

By Paul Goodman

PM Press

Copyright © 2010 Sally Goodman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-056-6

CHAPTER 1

i

On March 4, 1969, there was a "work stoppage" and teach-in initiated by dissenting professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed at thirty other major universities and technical schools across the country, against misdirected scientific research and the abuse of scientific technology. In this book I want to consider this event in a broader context than the professors did, as part of a religious crisis. An attack on the American scientific establishment is an attack on the worldwide system of belief. I think we are on the eve of a new Reformation, and no institution or status will go unaffected.

March 4 was, of course, only the latest of a series of protests in the twenty-five years since the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, during which time the central funding of research and innovation has grown so enormously and its purposes have become so unpalatable. In 1940 the federal budget for research and development was seventy-three million dollars, in 1967 seventeen billion. As the old man predicted in The Empire City, the "duration" has lasted longer than the war. Hitler's war was a watershed of modern times. We are accustomed, as H. R. Trevor-Roper has pointed out, to write Hitler off as an aberration, who was of little political significance. But in fact the military emergency that he and his Japanese allies created confirmed the worst tendencies of the giant states, till now they are probably irreversible by ordinary political means.

After Hiroshima, there was the conscience-stricken movement of the atomic scientists and the founding of their Bulletin. The American Association for the Advancement of Science pledged itself to keep the public informed about the dangerous bearings of new developments. There was the Oppenheimer incident. Ads of the East Coast scientists successfully stopped the bomb shelters, warned about the fallout, and helped produce the test ban. There was a scandal about the bombardment of the Van Allen belt. Scientists and technologists formed a powerful (and misguided) ad hoc group for Johnson in the 1964 election. In some universities, sometimes with bitter struggle, classified contracts have been excluded. There is a Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Rachel Carson's book on the pesticides made a stir, until the Department of Agriculture rescued the manufacturers and plantation-owners. Ralph Nader has been on his rampage. Thanks to spectacular abuses like the smog, strip-mining, oil pollution, random use of pesticides, and asphalting of arable land, ecologists and conservationists have been getting a hearing. Protest against the sonic boom has slowed the development of the supersonic transport. At present (1969), there is a concerted outcry against the antiballistic missiles.

The target of protest has become broader and the grounds of complaint deeper. The target is now not merely the military but the universities, the commercial corporations, and the government. It is said that money is being given by the wrong sponsors to the wrong people for the wrong purposes. In some of the great schools such funding is the main support; for instance at M.I.T. 90 percent of the research budget is from the government, and 65 percent of that is military.

Inevitably, such funding channels the brainpower of most of the brightest science students, who go where the action is, and this predetermines the course of American science and technology for the foreseeable future. At present nearly two hundred thousand American engineers and scientists spend all their time making weapons. This is a comment on, perhaps an explanation for, the usual statement that more scientists are now alive than since Adam and Eve. And the style of our research and development is not good. It is dominated by production of hardware, logistics, and devising of salable novelties. Often there is secrecy, always nationalism. Since the grants go overwhelmingly through a very few corporations and universities, they favor a limited number of scientific attitudes and preconceptions, with incestuous staffing. There is a premium on "positive results"; surprising "failures" cannot be pursued, so that science ceases to be a wandering dialogue with the unknown.

The policy is economically wasteful. A vast amount of brains and money is spent on crash programs to solve often essentially petty problems, and the claim that there is a spin-off of useful discoveries is laughable, considering the sums involved. The claim that research is neutral, and it doesn't matter what one works on, is shabby, considering the heavy funding in certain directions. Social priorities are scandalous: money is spent on overkill, the supersonic plane, brand-name identical drugs, annual model changes of cars, new detergents, and color television — many have objected to the moon shot — whereas water, air, cities, food, health, and foreign aid are neglected. And much research is so morally repugnant (consider the work on chemical and biological weapons) that we dare not humanly continue it.

The state of the behavioral sciences is, if anything, worse. Their claim to moral and political neutrality becomes, in effect, a means of diverting attention from glaring social evils, and they are in fact used — or would be if they worked — for warfare and social engineering, manipulation of people for the political and economic purposes of the powers that be. This is an especially sad betrayal since, in the not-too-distant past, the objective social sciences were developed largely to dissolve orthodoxy, irrational authority, and taboo. They were heretical and intellectually revolutionary, as the physical sciences had been in their own heroic age — and they weren't getting government grants.

This was the grim indictment of March 4, 1969. Even so, I do not think the dissenting scientists understand how deep their trouble is. They still take themselves too much for granted. Indeed, a repeated theme of the March 4th complaints was that the science budget was being cut back, especially in basic research. The assumption was that, though the sciences are abused, Science would rightly maintain and increase its expensive preeminence among social institutions. Our society was in a bad way; the abuse of science was part of it; but Science could find the answers.

Underlying the growing dissent, however, there is a historical crisis. There has been a profound change in popular feeling, more than among the professors. Put it this way: Modern societies have been operating as if religion were a minor and moribund part of the scheme of things. But this is unlikely. Men do not do without a system of "meanings" that everybody believes and puts his hope in even if, or especially if, he doesn't know anything about it; what Freud called a "shared psychosis," meaningful because shared, and with the power that resides in dream and longing. And in fact, in advanced countries it is science and technology themselves that have gradually and at last triumphantly become the system of mass faith, not disputed by various political ideologies and nationalisms that have also been mass religions. Marxism called itself "scientific socialism," as against moral and utopian socialisms; and movements of national liberation have especially promised to open the benefits of industrialization and technological progress when once they have gotten rid of the imperialists.

For three hundred years, science and scientific technology had an unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure, pouring out practical benefits and liberating spirit from the errors of superstition and traditional faith. During the twentieth century, science and scientific technology have been the only generally credited systems of explanation and problem-solving. Yet in our generation they have come to seem to many, and to very many of the best of the young, essentially inhuman, abstract, regimenting, hand in glove with Power, and even diabolical. Young people say that science is anti-life, it is a Calvinist obsession, it has been a weapon of white Europe to subjugate colored races; and manifestly — in view of recent scientific technology — people who think "scientifically" become insane. With science, the other professions are discredited. The academic "disciples" are discredited.

The immediate reasons for this shattering reversal of values are fairly obvious: Hitler's ovens and his other experiments in eugenics, the first atom bombs and their frenzied subsequent developments, the deterioration of the physical environment and the destruction of the biosphere, the catastrophes impending over the cities because of technological failures and psychological stress, the prospect of a brainwashed and drugged 1984. Innovations yield diminishing returns in enhancing life. And instead of rejoicing, there is now widespread conviction that beautiful advances, in genetics, surgery, computers, rocketry, or atomic energy, will surely only increase human woe.

In such a crisis, in my opinion, it will not be sufficient to ban the military from the universities; and it will not even be sufficient, as liberal statesmen and many of the big corporations envisage, to beat the swords into plough-shares and turn to solving problems of transportation, desalinization, urban renewal, garbage disposal, and cleaning up the air and water. If the present difficulty is religious and historical, it is necessary to alter the entire relationship of science, technology, and social needs both in men's minds and in fact. This involves changes in the organization of science, in scientific education, and in the kinds of men who make scientific decisions.

I do not mean that we will turn away from science. In spite of the fantasies of hippies, we are certainly going to continue to live in a technological world. The question is a different one: Is it viable? Can it be made viable?

ii

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. It aims at prudent goods for the commonweal, to provide efficient means for these goods. At present, however, "scientific technology" occupies a bastard position, in the universities, in funding, and in the public mind. It is half tied to the theoretical sciences and half treated as mere know-how for political and commercial purposes. It has no principles of its own. To remedy this — so Karl Jaspers in Europe and Robert Hutchins in America have urged — technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine, law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them. As a moral philosopher, a technician should be able to criticize the programs given him to implement. As a professional in a community of learned professionals, a technologist must have a different kind of training and develop a different character from what we see at present among technicians and engineers. He should know something of the social sciences, law, the fine arts, and medicine, as well as relevant natural sciences.

Prudence is foresight, caution, utility. Thus it is up to the technologists, not merely to regulatory agencies of the government, to provide for safety and to think about remote effects. This is what Ralph Nader sometimes says and Rachel Carson used to ask. An important aspect of caution is flexibility, to avoid the pyramiding catastrophe that occurs when something goes wrong in interlocking technologies, as in urban power failures. Naturally, to take responsibility often requires standing up to the front office, urban politicians, and the Pentagon, and technologists must organize themselves in order to have power to do it.

Often it is pretty clear that a technology has been oversold, like the cars. Then even though the public, seduced by advertising, wants more, technologists must balk, as any professional does when his client wants what isn't good for him. We are now repeating the same self-defeating congestion with the planes and airports: the more the technology is oversold, the less immediate utility it provides, the greater the costs, and the more damaging the remote effects. As this becomes evident, it is time for technologists to confer with sociologists and economists and ask deeper questions. Is so much travel necessary? Are there ways to diminish it? Instead, the recent history of technology has consisted largely of desperate efforts to remedy situations caused by previous overapplications of technology.

Technologists should certainly have a say about simple waste, for even in an affluent society there are priorities — consider the supersonic transport, which has little to recommend it. But the moon shot has presented the more usual dilemma of authentic conflicting claims. I myself believe that space exploration is a great human adventure, with immense esthetic and moral benefits, whatever the scientific or utilitarian uses. It must be pursued. Yet the context and auspices have been such that perhaps it would be better if it were not pursued. (This is discussed in Chapter 2.)

These days, perhaps the chief moral criterion of a philosophic technology is modesty, having a sense of the whole and not obtruding more than a particular function warrants. Immodesty is always a danger of free enterprise, but when the same disposition to market is financed by big corporations, technologists rush into production with solutions that swamp the environment. This applies to the packaging and garbage, freeways that bulldoze neighborhoods, high rises that destroy landscape, wiping out species for a passing fashion, strip mining, scrapping an expensive machine rather than making a minor repair, draining a watershed for irrigation because (as in Southern California) the cultivable land has been covered by asphalt. Given this disposition, it is not surprising that we defoliate a forest in order to expose a guerrilla and spray tear gas from a helicopter on a crowded campus.

Since we are technologically overcommitted, a good general maxim in advanced countries at present is to innovate in order to simplify, but otherwise to innovate as sparingly as possible. Every advanced country is overtechnologized; past a certain point, the quality of life diminishes with new "improvements." Yet no country is rightly technologized, making efficient use of available techniques. There are ingenious devices for unimportant functions, stressful mazes for essential functions, and drastic dislocation when anything goes wrong, which happens with increasing frequency. To add to the complexity, the mass of people tend to become incompetent, and dependent on repairmen. Indeed, unrepairability except by experts has become a desideratum of industrial design.

When I speak of slowing down or cutting back, the issue is not whether research and making working models should be encouraged or not. They should be, in every direction, and given a blank check. The point is to resist the temptation to apply every new device without a second thought. But the big corporate organization of research and development makes prudence and modesty very difficult; it is necessary to get big contracts and rush into production in order to pay the salaries of the big team, and to keep the team from dispersing. Like bureaucracies, technological organizations are finally run to maintain themselves in being, as a team, but they are more dangerous because in capitalist countries they are in a competitive arena and must stir up business.

It used to be the classical socialist objection to capitalism that it curtailed innovation and production in order to make the most out of existing capital. This objection still holds, of course — a serious example is the foot-dragging about producing an electric or steam car which, according to Ford, will take thirty years, though models adequate for urban use are ready for production at present. But by and large, the present menace of free enterprise is proving to be the same as its past glory, its fantastic productivity, its technological explosion. And this is not the classic overproduction that creates a glut on the market; it is overproduction that burdens life and the environment.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: PM PRESS
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604860561
• ISBN 13: 9781604860566
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194