brave new word

III. Over-Organization

The shortest and broadest road to the nightmare of Brave New World leads, as I have pointed out,

through over-population and the accelerating increase of human numbers -- twenty-eight hundred

millions today, fifty-five hundred millions by the turn of the century, with most of humanity facing the

choice between anarchy and totalitarian control. But the increasing pressure of numbers upon available

resources is not the only force propelling us in the direction of totalitarianism. This blind biological

enemy of freedom is allied with immensely powerful forces generated by the very advances in

technology of which we are most proud. Justifiably proud, it may be added; for these advances are the

fruits of genius and persistent hard work, of logic, imagination and self- denial -- in a word, of moral and

intellectual virtues for which one can feel nothing but admiration. But the Nature of Things is such that

nobody in this world ever gets anything for nothing. These amazing and admirable advances have had to

be paid for. Indeed, like last year's washing machine, they are still being paid for -- and each installment

is higher than the last. Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and

with a deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for

technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish

in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But

the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of

power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex

and more expensive -- and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass

production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the

largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little

Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the

Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has

gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by

fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology

and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State -- that is to say, by a small group of

party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist

democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the

Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country's working force in its

factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its

products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the

feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so

many been manipulated so much by so few. We are far indeed from Jefferson's ideal of a genuinely free

society composed of a hierarchy of self- governing units -- "the elementary republics of the wards, the

county republics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities."

We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power,

and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states,

politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are

composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities

and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances

of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich

Fromm:

Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is

increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security,

happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an

automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair

hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are

conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental

hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where

there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for

integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found

among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well

adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives,

that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal

not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a

profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their

mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if

they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality,"

but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into

something like uniformity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health

are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for

mental health is destroyed."

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every

other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father's genes into contact with the mother's.

These hereditary factors may be combined in an al- most infinite number of ways. Physically and

mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of

some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage

against man's biological nature.

Science may be defined as the reduction of multiplicity to unity. It seeks to explain the endlessly diverse

phenomena of nature by ignoring the uniqueness of particular events, concentrating on what they have

in common and finally abstracting some kind of "law," in terms of which they make sense and can be

effectively dealt with. For examples, apples fall from the tree and the moon moves across the sky.

People had been observing these facts from time immemorial. With Gertrude Stein they were convinced

that an apple is an apple is an apple, whereas the moon is the moon is the moon. It remained for Isaac

Newton to perceive what these very dissimilar phenomena had in common, and to formulate a theory

of gravitation in terms of which certain aspects of the behavior of apples, of the heavenly bodies and

indeed of everything else in the physical universe could be explained and dealt with in terms of

a single system of ideas. In the same spirit the artist takes the innumerable diversities and uniquenesses

of the outer world and his own imagination and gives them meaning within an orderly system of plastic,

literary or musical patterns. The wish to impose order upon confusion, to bring harmony out of

dissonance and unity out of multiplicity is a kind of intellectual instinct, a primary and fundamental urge

of the mind. Within the realms of science, art and philosophy the workings of what I may call this "Will

to Order" are mainly beneficent. True, the Will to Order has produced many premature syntheses based

upon insufficient evidence, many absurd systems of metaphysics and theology, much pedantic mistaking

of notions for realities, of symbols and abstractions for the data of immediate experience. But these

errors, however regrettable, do not do much harm, at any rate directly -- though it sometimes happens

that a bad philosophical system may do harm indirectly, by being used as a justification for senseless

and inhuman actions. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to

Order becomes really dangerous.

Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the

practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the

equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In

economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in

which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of

those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for

despotism.

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community

of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much

organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the

very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of

laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.

During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by

corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated

social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of

production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindividualize themselves,

have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to

become automata.

The dehumanizing effects of over-organization are reinforced by the dehumanizing effects of over-

population. Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity's increasing numbers

into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence of

schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of industrial slums); nor does it

foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of

a genuine democracy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another,

not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work,

as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely

and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal -- a creature more

like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies

bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other

things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of

the social in- sects' organic communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and

technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has come to seem a realizable and

even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf

separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained mammal; and even though the

mammal should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men

cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create

an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to

recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible.

That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the

fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to co-operate with the blind forces that are propelling us. For

the moment, however, the wish to resist does not seem to be very strong or very widespread. As Mr.

William Whyte has shown in his remarkable book, The Organization Man, a new Social Ethic is replacing

our traditional ethical system -- the system in which the individual is primary. The key words in this

Social Ethic are "adjustment," "adaptation," "socially orientated behavior," "belongingness," "acquisition

of social skills," "team work," "group living," "group loyalty," "group dynamics," "group thinking," "group

creativity." Its basic assumption is that the social whole has greater worth and significance than its

individual parts, that inborn biological differences should be sacrificed to cultural uniformity, that the

rights of the collectivity take precedence over what the eighteenth century called the Rights of Man.

According to the Social Ethic, Jesus was completely wrong in asserting that the Sabbath was made for

man. On the contrary, man was made for the Sabbath, and must sacrifice his inherited idiosyncrasies

and pretend to be the kind of standardized good mixer that organizers of group activity regard as ideal

for their purposes. This ideal man is the man who displays "dynamic conformity" (delicious phrase!) and

an intense loyalty to the group, an unflagging desire to subordinate himself, to belong. And the ideal

man must have an ideal wife, highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely re- signed to the fact

that her husband's first loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account. "He for God

only," as Milton said of Adam and Eve, "she for God in him." And in one important respect the wife of

the ideal organization man is a good deal worse off than our First Mother. She and Adam were

permitted by the Lord to be completely uninhibited in the matter of "youthful dalliance."

Nor turned, I ween,

Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused.

Today, according to a writer in the Harvard Business Review, the wife of the man who is trying to live up

to the ideal proposed by the Social Ethic, "must not demand too

much of her husband's time and interest. Because of his single-minded concentration on his job, even

his sexual activity must be relegated to a secondary place." The monk makes vows of poverty, obedience

and chastity. The organization man is allowed to be rich, but promises obedience ("he accepts authority

without resentment, he looks up to his superiors"-- Mussolini ha sempre ragione) and he must be

prepared, for the greater glory of the organization that employs him, to forswear even conjugal love.

It is worth remarking that, in 1984, the members of the Party are compelled to conform to a sexual ethic

of more than Puritan severity. In Brave New World, on the other hand, all are permitted to indulge their

sexual impulses without let or hindrance. The society described in Orwell's fable is a society

permanently at war, and the aim of its rulers is first, of course, to exercise power for its own delightful

sake and, second, to keep their subjects in that state of constant tension which a state of constant war

demands of those who wage it. By crusading against sexuality the bosses are able to maintain the

required tension in their followers and at the same time can satisfy their lust for power in a most

gratifying way. The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been

eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble.

This they achieve by (among other methods) legaliz- ing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by

the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of

destructive (or creative) emotional tension. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in

Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.

The current Social Ethic, it is obvious, is merely a justification after the fact of the less desirable

consequences of over-organization. It represents a pathetic attempt to make a virtue of necessity, to

extract a positive value from an unpleasant datum. It is a very unrealistic, and therefore very dangerous,

system of morality. The social whole, whose value is assumed to be greater than that of its component

parts, is not an organism in the sense that a hive or a termitary may be thought of as an organism. It is

merely an organization, a piece of social machinery. There can be no value except in relation to life and

awareness. An organization is neither conscious nor alive. Its value is instrumental and derivative. It is

not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the

parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to

means. What happens when ends are subordinated to means was clearly demonstrated by Hitler and

Stalin. Under their hideous rule personal ends were subordinated to organizational means by a mixture

of violence and propaganda, systematic terror and the systematic manipulation of minds. In the more

efficient dictatorships of tomorrow there will probably be much less violence than under Hitler and

Stalin. The future dictator's subjects will be painlessly regimented by a corps of highly trained social

engineers. "The challenge of social engineering in our time," writes an enthusiastic advocate of this new

science, "is like the challenge of technical engineering fifty years ago. If the first half of the twentieth

century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social

engineers" -- and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific

caste system and Brave New World. To the question quis custodiet custodeal -- Who will mount guard

over our guardians, who will engineer the engineers? -- the answer is a bland denial that they need any

supervision. There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D.'s in sociology that Ph.D.'s in

sociology will never be corrupted by power.

Like Sir Galahad's, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure -- and their heart is

pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.

Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to

these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific

character. Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of

which they justify their manipulations of human beings? For example, Professor Elton Mayo tells us

categori- cally that "man's desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not

the strongest human characteristic." This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind

of desire described by Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of tem- perament and inherited constitution.

Any social organization based upon the assumption that "man" (whoever "man" may be) desires to be

continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of

Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the rack could they be adjusted to it.

Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many

contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! "Membership in a guild, manorial estate or

village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity." Protected him

from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors. And along

with all that "peace and serenity" there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of

chronic frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the rigid, hierarchical

system that permitted no vertical movement up the social ladder and, for those who were bound to the

land, very little horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-

organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the

direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such

Brave-New- Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but,

for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.