Flowers The Greening of America

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To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who would change the hearts of men?

THE REAL WORLD has rarely been a thing that sensitive and timid natures would regard without a shudder. But Charles Reich, 42-year-old Yale professor, has a vision, and the vision has given him courage. He calls it the "Greening of America," and means the emergence-" like flowers pushing up through a concrete pavement" -of a new consciousness, a new perception of and attitude toward the modern technological world, which will spread and flourish through the soul of our society.

It is the vision of a cultural revolution which will restore the world to man, to man the individual, the free-wheeling dreamer, the reveler in personal responsibility, the humane and happy.

According to Reich, the original American consciousness thrived in innocent self-interest, dependent on a rather shallow faith in achievement through individual virtue. In the 20rh century the powerful but poorly understood forces of technology-the impersonal impulses toward efficiency and progress through scientific management-harnessed this consciousness. They spawned and nurtured the intimate association of government and big business which Reich calls the corporate state. They became the ultimate determinants of social value and the general welfare, of truth and happiness. They became God; the corporate state became the hand of God.

Like God, these forces depend for their power on belief. They demand the greatest possible production and the greatest possible consumption, so the people must be eager producers and eager consumers. Largely through mass-media advertising, cultivating dissatisfactions, playing on pressures to compete and conform, the corporate state persuades people to worship discipline and hedonism simultaneously. The inevitable contradiction, intensified out of human proportions, destroys all harmony between work and play and makes lives schizophrenic and tragic.

In its relentless logic, the corporate state deprives people even of the search for their lost wholeness. Only the experiences of "dread, awe, wonder, mystery, accidents, failure, helplessness, magic" make the search possible, and these are denied. In the corporate state, says Reich, "the richness, the satisfactions, the joy of life are to be found in power, success, status, acceptance, popularity, achievements, rewards and the rational, competent mind."

YET, the better the corporate state persuades, the more precarious becomes the split consciousness it requires. The more it becomes possible to satisfy everybody's economic interest, the more artificial become the dissatisfactions. With our generation, offered by the corporate state the greatest promise of life ever, yet acutely conscious of the threat to that promise "posed by everything from neon ugliness to boring jobs to the Vietnam war and the shadow of nuclear holocaust," with our generation, which never quite accepted the premises of power of the corporate state, the old consciousness was pierced and made self-aware. The "postures and pretenses" finally could not bear the overwhelming discrepancy youth perceived between promise and reality.

But other generations have been disillusioned. Ours, rather, is disabused of belief in the ultimate importance of the forces behind the corporate state, freed in the very act of seeing the individual's potential for guiding his own thoughts and tastes. The promise of life is not false. Nor is technology a monster to be slayed. The dehumanized, single-minded movement of the corporate state toward efficiency and growth and progress is what must be got rid of and technology put in its place, that is, subordinated to man.

Men like Reich, synthesizers, those who draw together the diffused and tangled strands of an age to weave them into articulate patterns, deserve the highest praise for their effort, and for their courage. Not the least value of their work is the dialogue it may provoke. Since the appearance of Reich's original 30,000-word article in the September 26 issue of the New Yorker -a superbly ironic vehicle with its two columns of corporate state persuasion for every column of Reich's text-there has been incessant buzzing about it in both political and academic circles. John Galbraith and George Kennan have each written a personal response in the Times.

Galbraith's primary criticism is that "Reich has not worked out the economics of the [new] life style." True enough. But it is doubtful that one can know what institutions will look like after a sweeping cultural revolution. Furthermore, the best revolutionary tactic, as Louis Hartz has said, is that which "makes the future both mysterious and lucid" -lucid enough to give people the confidence to act, but not freighted with details which can be compromised to reinforce the status quo.

Kennan faults Reich for his "departure from the voice of reason" and his failure to take account of the "problems, or even the concept, of representative government." Alas, Mr. Kennan sounds rather more romantic than Reich sounds utopian. To call for "frank recognition" and "public discussion" of our problems (and the sketch Kennan offers is every bit as bleak as Reich's), for legislative reforms and basically political solutions, is romantic. Recognition and reform will not come without a change of consciousness; with a change of consciousness they are inevitable.

THE MOST crucial questions, I think, lie else where. There can be little doubt that a new consciousness does in fact exist and has become respectable to a sizable group of disaffected middle-class people, primarily young. And this new consciousness is revolutionary. But there will be a revolution only if the consciousness suits most people. One wonders.

Just as the corporate state makes its demand for compliance to its standards, the new consciousness makes its own demand for full personal responsibility for one's actions and commitments (there can be no "frank recognition" without it). When one truly affirms the right of the individual conscience to transcend the state, when one goes beyond aphoristic morality and recognizes the ambiguity of human action, when one admits that equality as an institutional principle can actually dehumanize personal experience (for example, sharing equally among unequals is a denial of individuality), the burdens and the dangers become complicated, unsettling, and extremely demanding. Not everyone is a Yale student; freedom is not everyone's idea of a good time.

Many will fight for the security of the corporate state, even if that security is a deception and an instrument of anguish. Nor are such people likely to vanish through the cycle of generations. Parents raise children in their own image, and most children comply. The apparent radicalism of many high school and junior high students may be no more than the unenlightened protection of group self-interests such as the New Deal saw.

Many of us today nurse a mild pessimism. We can probably find satisfaction and stability within personal realms, and for dealing with society and polities one might cultivate Russell Baker's "ability to roll with a cruel joke and come back shrugging." For the time being.

But what of succeeding generations? Sure, they'll make their own way, but toward what?

For even if Charles Reich is right, and we are in the beginnings of a new enlightenment, it's still a-close race. The world is going to hell like crazy. The nature of the human condition may itself be drastically altered.

If the enlightenment doesn't hurry up, it may indeed be "like flowers pushing up through a concrete pavement," only a sad, slight "greening of America."