150
BEN B. SELIGMAN
arithmetic to replace conscience, the victor must be he who seizes the
ethic of efficiency.
For example, there is now abroad in the land a new breed of
utopians. Scientists, engine'ers, systems men,
comput~r
experts and cor–
porate oligarchs, they have the "capability" to design ways of achieving
their
purpose~ontrol
of others-that go beyond the present. In contrast
to the gentle dreamers of the past, they are on the verge of making their
fantasies come true. Efficiency requires that they ignore human conse–
quences, for all they seek is reliability: but humans, unfortunately, ate
notoriously unreliable. Perhaps that is man's salvation: his essential
complexity may yet confound the worshippers of efficiency. Even Stalin's
Russia could not create a new Soviet type and in Orwell's 1984 there is
always the lingering suspicion that O'Brien's torture rack did not fully
cleanse Winston Smith's soul.
Undoubtedly it is man's resiliency that bolsters Harrington's optim–
ism. He argues that despite bureaucratic structures, the repression of
instinctual drives and the failure thus far to control his destiny, man
may yet form a new society. The Harrington approach, of course, is
socialist but pragmatic: the collective ownership of technology and its
products based on a commitment to free choice for the individual, he
urges, ought
to
be the basic rule for any decent modem society. This
requires the sort of planning, he says, that would transform power, making
it a vehicle for those values that might guide the use of technology in
responsible ways.
Harrington's scheme is not unreasonable, for given the agonies of
technological change, there can be little cause for universal celebration.
As he says, Western man has revolutionized everything about him, except
himself. That is why Harrington is able to relate-and I
think
rather
well-the views of Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, Proust and others to the
technological and economic dilemmas of the day. These writers knew
better than sociologists and economists that the impersonal drives of man's
technique-impersonal but not accidental-could offer only a self-satisfied
emptiness. These parts of the book, which reveal an uncommon awareness
of the totality of our culture, should impell us to return to the classics,
for they would demonstrate that when ideology ends, utopia ends and
writes
finis
to the prospect for achieving genuine humanity. The writers
Harrington cites describe for
him,
as they do for many of us, the dis–
integration of a society enamoured of technique, a disintegration sym–
bolized in Coya's drawings of war.
Is Harrington inventing problems just to talk about them? I beli'eve
not. They are there, real, enormous, dominating our thought, which ought
