Books Boorstin for Radicals "The Decline of Radicalism: Reflections on America Today"

YOU might be outraged by The Deline of Radicalism: Time says Nixon read this book during the November Moratorium, closeted in a back-room of the White House.

But students of American History might recall that progressives and conservatives have frequently crossed purposes. Fitzhugh treated slavery as advanced socialism in 1854; Margaret Chase Smith's liberal abstention cleared the way for ABM development in 1969. Daniel Boorstin is no exception. His latest book, ostensibly a critical defense of the established order, provides a radical with material for a scathing indictment of this order. The author makes a value judgment, but, for??nately, he has not allowed his opinions to color the pages of research and insights he has compiled.

The book is a collection of essays, somewhat repetitions; yet the points Boorstin makes sustain repetition. Each original example, each lively anecdote he presents is a small revelation. His opinion is his right: his material, though, is highly relevant. His conclusion, an appeal for rational compromise, might well make Richard Nixon's heart palpitate gratefully-but his research calls for a radical interpretation.

With consistent insight. Boorstin chronicles the development of the American "standard of living":

We are by all odds the most numbered, the most numerated, the most frequently and variously counted people in history.

Statistical science, advertising, philanthropy, retail department stores, media-these are American "traditions" which have contributed to the growth of what Boorstin calls "Consumption Communities": communities based on the "vague. a?tentuated, temporary" ties of shared brand names and shared possessions. To the mu???al self-interest of all involved, the standard of living has become the most ambiguotis, most attenuated, yet most basic social tie of all.

The attributes Boorstin gives the standard of living community-"pervasive, re?iprocal, communal, cosmopolitan, universalizing, conspicuous" - form definite patterns of association, a non-political "way of life." The Harris and Gallup polls seem to create order from the vagueness through statistics. Then suddenly, in the last decade, the numbers no longer reflect opinion, but create it. Facts, Boorstin warns, are becoming norms.

Nowadays, when a California suburbanite calls himself a member of a "two-car family" he is using statistics as a mirror; he is putting himself in a Statistical Community.

The American is becoming the product of an environment which he himself has created-and there is no fixed point in this vicious circle.

Boorstin leaves us with a vivid picture of the "vague, attenuated, switchable" nature of modern society-a society which rests on assumptions and expectations which tacitly moderate social behavior. In a society whose opinions are at least partiaily manufactured by the agencies which supposedly chart opinion, the desire to initiate thought has been replaced by a vague but far-reaching impulse to think alike. The voluntary aspect of government by consent has been voluntarily subordinated to the needs and demands of "government by standard of living."

In a "standard of living" society, the community of the "?lent majority," then, is close-minded. Progressive thought, which threatens social equilibrium, is hardly tolerated. The political system, here and abroad, the self-sustaining standard-of-living ideal, the American way of life. Boorstin has coined a phrase, the "self-fulfilling prophecy," which perfectly describes the circular thrust of America's standard of living ideology. Tocqueville saw the same tendency in 1830 when he declared. "The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause...."

IN THE second part of his book, Mr. Boorstin reveals the extent to which the Consumption Community has fostered dissent, particularly through the media.

The elaboration of our newspaper and magazine press, of radio and television, together with the American standard of living leads us also to exaggerate the importance of dissent in our society... to stimulate and accentuate dissent rather than disagreement. To push disagreement toward dissent so that we can have a more dramatic or reportable event. To push the statement of a program toward the expression of a feeling of separate ness or isolation.

Like Spiro Agnew, Boorstin calls for "more attractive programs, affirming institutions." provoking "disagreement" rather than "dissent." Yet his earlier point is undeniable: the media design their programs not to insure community values but to satisfy the public, through the advertisers, the Nielsen ratings, and more furtive psychological methods. The vicarious, cathartic and self-protective needs of the viewer must be changed; only then will the television programs be able to reflect this change. Until then, the standard-of-living society will continue to exacerbate the discontented radical minority.

The majority of Americans seek refuge behind a mirror that reflects only movements they themselves have generated:

One of the most difficult problems in our society today is to get a message in from outside. We believe in our power to make ourselves.

Consequently, potentially constructive disagrees have been driven to dissent out of pure frustration. And now, Boorstin writes, when the spirit of dissent "seeks the dignity and privilege of disagreement" it is "entitled to neither."

Why is that? Must the dissenter remain isolated in a closed circle of "vagrancy and uncertainty?" Must Boorstin's Consumption Community and his radical New Barbarians be polarized in two similarly illusive yet conflicting worlds of "self-fulfilling prophecies?"

Boorstin accuses the dissenters of rejecting experience for sensation. Yet the two aren't mutually exclusive. The opposite of sensation is non-sensation, and this is what the New Barbarian rejects. In a society which has imposed a model upon humanity, pursuit of sensory awareness is a search for humanity. Boorstin's New Barbarian (Perhaps we might call him the New American?) reacts to the vague but stifling conformity which Boorstin describes so well.

The reaction is a dramatic affirmation of the living organism.

In his prophetic book, The Image, Mr. Boorstin gropes for an answer:

What we need first and now is to disillusion ourselves. What ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality. To discover our illusions ... may-help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image.

Read the book; read all his books. You have nothing to lose but your illusions.