316
IRVING HOWE
... Because of its proliferation, the technical phenomenon has
assumed an independent character quite apart from economic
considerations, and ... it develops according to its own intrinsic
laws. Technique has become man's new milieu, replacing his
former natural milieu. And just as man's natural environment
obeys its own physical, chemical and other laws, our artificial,
technical environment is now so constituted that it has also its
own laws of organization, development and reproduction. . . .
... This
view of technique leads me to think that modifications
in economic structure, a
detente
in
international relations, and
improved cooperation among nations will cause practically no
change in the technical phenomenon.
And on a somewhat wider plane, Herbert Marcuse writes:
The world tends to become the stuff of total administration,
which absorbs even the administrators themselves.
• The decay of the Western pa7ty system.
Though touched upon
in
many studies, this theme has, to my knowledge, not yet received
a definitive statement. It is clear that in most of the Western countries
the party system has been steadily drained of content. It survives, in
some places, as mere ritual or anachronism, and sometimes as a mechan–
ism for the efficient division of power and spoils among an elite; it
no longer reflects, certainly not to the extent that it once did, basic
differences of class interest, political allegiance or moral value. Even
in those countries where the apparatus of representative democracy
survives, it tends to become vestigial, confined to
a
minority of pro–
fessionals and of decreasing interest to the mass of citizens. Yet for
democrats this party system, even in decline, remains precious, a
concrete embodiment of freedoms for which, thus far, no substitute
nearly as satisfactory has been found.
• The satisfaction of material wants tends to undercut the possi–
bility for social transcendence.
Herbert Marcuse writes:
TechnicaL progress, extended to a whole system of domination
and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which
appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat
or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of
freedom from toil and domination.
• There develops, partly in cons.equenc.e of the above-listed ele–
ments, a new kind of .!'ociety, what we call "mass society."
It
is a
relatively comfortable, half-welfare and half-garrison society in which
the population grows passive, indifferent and atomized; in which "pri–
mary groups" tend to disintegrate; in which traditional loyalties, ties
and associations become lax or dissolve entirely; in which coherent
