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NAT HENTOFF
preceded it.
It
is here, too, that some street radicals agree-ideologically
-with a few intellectuals like economist Robert Theobald and most
of the members of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution.
Though there is no unanimity on program .and goals, there is a
general agreement that we have passed the Industrial Age and are
in the Age of Cybernation, and that accordingly, as U Thant has
said, "The truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed coun–
tries today is that they can have-in anything but the shortest run-the
kind and scale of resources they decide to have. . . .
It
is no longer
resources that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the
resources. This is the fundamental revolutionary change-perhaps the
most revolutionary man has ever known."
Yet in
this
country decisions have not been made to begin to
produce and allocate resources so that poverty can actually be ended.
The ominous trend, as Ben Seligman has shown with particular clarity
in "Automation and the Unions"
(Dissent,
Winter 1965), is instead
toward more structural unemployment. And unless a new politics
elects a greatly changed Congress, the future will resemble the predic–
tion in
Trans-Action
(September-October 1964) of sociologists Sidney
M. Willhelm and Elwin H. Powell: "... the Negro
is
merely a
weathervane for the future.
His
experience will be a common one for
many whites now deprived of some sort of usefulness;
his
frustrations
will become those for many others the longer we hesitate to confront
the meaning of human dignity in an automated society. As more of
us become unnecessary-the greater will be our social anxiety."
Or, in an even grimmer view of the future, there may be no
anxiety at all. Instead there could be further dehumanization in an
entirely paternalistic welfare society. No vestiges of decision-making
or power-sharing would remain for the masses; and with the accelerat–
ingly sophisticated development of the manipulative technological
society, it will even be possible, as Jacques Ellul notes, to modify
man's thoughts and emotions in order to convince him he is happy.
At that point, Ellul concludes, "we shall have nothing more to loSe,
and nothing to win"
(The Technological Society).
And in a society so
thoroughly ordered, civil liberties as we conceive of them
will
be
inefficient anachronisms.
The new radicals, therefore, believe not that cybernation can
be
stopped, but that it
is
not too late to shape a technological society so
