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ciety, Brzezinski believes, is entering new social, political and emotional
relationships because of mass education, the communications revolu–
tion and the advance of technology. For the rest - the Black and the
poor - there has been a kind of technological lapse or neglect. We have
simply not yet programed them for a genuine role
in
society, or applied
modern science and sociology to their problems. Thus America, like
the world, has its ghettos. After quoting some employment figures on
the government's use of experts, in which the number of social scien–
tists and psychologists is extremely low, he offers his solutions: more
expertise, more technology and more manipulation.
It is here that the artificiality and distortion of his argument is
most glaring. Brzezinski celebrates the separation of politics from sci–
ence. American politics, he contends (quite rightly), are often ir–
relevant and harmful, but not, as he says, because they are passionate
or emotional. They are harmful because there is so little that is pol–
itical left in them. Technology has been isolated from politics and from
social control. Urban ghettos and rotting cities are not just forgotten
areas, they are technological junkyards. Pollution (which apparently
he doesn't see as much of a problem) and the general decay that
constitutes a total and perhaps final assault upon nature in the name
of progress are the result of technological improvement. Adding experts
who specialize in human manipulation to run things is no solution, but
merely the admission that scientific and technological training have
so distorted men that they cannot be trusted to act in any way ex–
cept as specialists. Hence most decision-making about technology has
been delegated to corporations or institutes or universities. The aban–
donment of political control over the application of science has made
technology almost entirely a tool of profit-making and manipulation.
Of course, there are some Americans who are out of step in this
parade of progress. Foremost is the New Left which has by and large
a "neo-totalitarian reaction to the third American Revolution." He
clearly dislikes the exuberance and strong hatreds of youth, particular–
ly because they have a chance to spoil it all. And the liberals, he con–
tinues, have been conditioned in the past to an irrational rejection of
the future, and an excessive conscience when it comes to the nontech–
netronic elements
in
society. It would be best to make peace with science
and with the majority of Americans and then regain the liberal's best
assets, "his optimism, his faith in America's future, his vision."
The final point of the argument is a celebration of America's con–
tinuing frontier tradition. From the primitive, driving conquest of a
continent to the dramatic capture of the moon, the main force, he con-
