318
IRVING HOWE
publics based on definite interests and opinions gradually fall apart;
and in which man becomes a consumer, himself mass-produced like the
products, diversions and values he absorbs.
When one is involved in concrete political analysis that involves
firm and immediate choices, it seems to me both intellectually facile
and morally disastrous to affirm an identity between the societies of
East and West. Though there is a tendency for the two to move closer
together in certain ways, the differences remain enormous and crucial.
But if one turns from the immediate political struggle to a kind of
speculation about the indefinite future, there may be some reason for
anticipating a society ruled by benevolent and modernized Grand In–
quisitors, an efficient political-technical elite that will avoid terror and
the grosser aspects of totalitarianism, that will perhaps even go through
the motions of democracy but in its essential character be thoroughly
authoritarian. It would be a society in regard to which Huxley's prophecy
would seem more accurate than Orwell's.
If
there will not be a war within the next period and a way is
found for controlling the birth rate, it becomes possible to envisage
a world, at least the part of it that
has
been industrialized, in which
material wants will be moderately satisfied. This possibility arises, not,
as radicals once thought, because there is an immediate likelihood that
the race will create for itself a free and humane order, but largely
because of the sheer cascading growth of technology.
To advance such a speculation at a time when the majority of
human beings on our planet still suffer from terrible poverty may
seem irrelevant and heartless. It is a speculation which rests on grossly
simplified ideas, partly on a technological determinism that cannot be
accepted by a sophisticated mind. But I offer it
not
as a prediction,
only as a possibility. That this possibility will not be realized in the
next several decades seems certain. But it remains worth considering
in its own right.
Suppose, then, that the goal of moderate material satisfaction is
reached after the next several decades in large areas of the world
and in societies that are not socialist and often not democratic. What
would the intellectuals say? We may assume that large numbers of
ordinary people, fed regularly and diverted by the mass media, would
be satisfied. But the intellectuals? Would they still remember or care
about the vision of human freedom?
In our time the Grand Inquisitor is no longer a withered Church–
man: stern, ascetic, undeluded. He is now a skilled executive who
knows how to manage large-scale enterprises and sustain the morale
of his employees. In the West he is a corporation official, in the East
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