524
DANIEL BELL
Kenneth Galbraiths, and "those others of our enlightened age
-so many of them now fluttering around the Kennedy throne
-who have long left behind the old provincial com for a
headier global view.
Here one finds the praise of the "simple virtues"-they are
always simple-the evocation of small town life and the uncluttered
Arcadia, against the modern, the sophisticated, the cosmopolitan. But
the Glenn flight, according to the editorial, proved more: it proved
the victory of "man" against the "mechanical" and implicitly, against
the intellectual. "This and that went wrong, we all learned, with
the unbelievably complex mechanism of Glenn's ship, as it whirled
through the emptiness of Space," continued the
National Review.
The attitude control thingamajigs didn't work right. There
were troubles in some of the communication instruments....
This and that went wrong with the mechanism, and man took
over and brought Friendship 7 to its strange harbor. . . . And
that is fine news, though it should hardly be news. It is good
technically, because we Americans with our gadgetry obsession
and our wish for too much convenience, safety and comfort,
tend to crowd all our machines and vehicles with too immensely
many tricky devices. Every additional transistor
in
these auto–
matic mechanisms means that many more connections to loosen;
every valve can fail to open; every fuse can blow.... It is
better news still, philosophically, we might say, because it re–
minds us that there is no such thing, and never will be, as a
"thinking" machine. Only man thinks, wills, decides, dares. No
machine, on land, in sea, air or space, can do man's job for
him: can choose, for good or ill.
The fact that "man" is also the one who designs the machine
is, of course, beside the point of the editorial. Its implication
is
fairly clear: don't let anyone tell us that space (or politics, or
economics, or life) is complicated; machines can never be perfect
("every valve can fail to open, every fuse can blow"); only "man"
(not the scientist or the intellectual) can think. In short, America
will be back on an even keel when the simple virtues prevail.
The theme of conspiracy haunts the mind of the radical Rightist.
It permits him to build up the image of the children of darkness
