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LEWIS COSER
major theme of cultural cnticism for some hundred and fifty years, is
simply based on a misunderstanding. What has been conceived as self–
estrangement, loss of a sense of identity, meaninglessness, rootlessness is
simply a process which has heightened man's self-consciousness and has
allowed him to choose more freely among various alternatives of action
and models of self-development. When men complain, for example, that
the work they do has lost meaning, they forget that they now have the
possibility to change jobs at will. White seems to
be
suggesting here
that,
if
I complain that the pork chop I am being served in the
cafeteria is unappetizing, I should consider that I have a wide range
of choice between a great variety of unappetizing dishes. Only nostalgic
intellectuals would apparently want to hanker back to those days when
dishes were more appetizing, but the variety of choice was limited.
White faces the future with a big Hurrah. Increasing complexity
and rationalization is a good thing and to doubt this is, somehow, an
un-American activity. Though he has read and analyzed the works of
the intellectuals in his sample, he remains almost completely unaffected
by their arguments. He never asks himself, for example, whether in–
creased functional rationality may not call forth a tendency toward
irrational escapes from a world grown drab and meaningless. Karl
Mannheim answered White's argument long before White advanced it,
when he referred to the distinction between functional and substantial
rationality. "Increasing industrialization," he wrote, "to be sure, implies
functional rationality, i.e., the organization of the activity of the
members of society with reference to objective ends. It does not to
the same extent promote 'substantial rationality,' i.e. the capacity to
act intelligently in a given situation on the basis of one's own insight
into the inter-relations of events." It would seem that the very increase
of functional rationality in modern society has led to a decrease of
substantial rationality. For modern "differentiated" man the very com–
plexity and incalculability of the forces at work in the social system, the
crises, war scares, and fears of nuclear annihilation have become as
powerful sources of anxieties as the incalculable effects of nature were
for the primitive. The sense of terrified helplessness which results would
seem to account for the appeal of modern secular mystagogues, and
political magicians. Under such circumstances, the very effect of the
functional rationalization White admires so much might well be to
make man ripe for the rule of a new Genghis Khan with a television set.
Furthermore, one is hard put to understand why complexity must
necessarily lead to cultural efflorescence and relative simplicity to cul–
tural stultification. It is certainly not true that, as society "progressed"
