by Daniel Bell
The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope.1
Jorge Luis Borges
“The Library of Babel”
THE PACE OF CHANGE
Few men have sought to understand contemporary society so desperately as Henry Adams, a scion of one of the most distinguished families in American life. His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had been the last representative of the patriciate in politics, and had fallen, finally, before the onslaught of Jacksonian populism. In a mass democracy there was little room, Henry Adams felt, for the natural aristocracy to which he belonged. In order to understand himself and his times, he turned to history.
For forty-five years Henry Adams pondered the past. He wrote a massive History of the United States, which is today unread; he traveled widely, retracing the steps of Gibbon through Rome. In the end, in that remarkable autobiography written in the third person, The Education of Henry Adams, he admitted his failure. “The human mind,” he wrote, “has always struggled like a frightened bird to escape the chaos which caged it. ...” He found himself in the same cage. “Never before had Adams been able to discern the working of law in history, which was the reason of his failure in teaching it; for chaos cannot be taught. ...”
Yet he would not give up his search for the hidden order of history; and thus it happened, as he wrote, that “after ten years of pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by sudden eruption of forces totally new.” It was in the great hall of dynamos that this revelation took place.
In the energy churning from the dynamo, Henry Adams felt he had caught a glimpse of the secret that could unravel the complexities men had begun to note about their time. In the nineteenth century, he wrote, society by common accord measured its progress by the output of coal. The ratio of increase in the volume of coal power, he now said exultantly, might serve as a “dynamometer.” Between 1840 and 1900, he pointed out, coal output had doubled every ten years; in the form of utilized power, each ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as it had in 1840. The gauge on the dynamometer of history had started out with arithmetical ratios; but new forces emerging around 1900—Adams had in mind the cracking of the world of appearances by the discovery of x-rays and radium—were creating new “supersensual” forces. What all this revealed, he said, was the foundation for a new, social physics, for a dynamic law of history, the fundamental secret of social change—the law of acceleration.
Impossibilities no longer stood in the way, he wrote in the Education, with a strange mingling of exultation and dismay.
One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph and the Daguerrotype. ... He had seen the coal output of the United States grow from nothing to three hundred million tons or more. What was far more serious, he had seen the number of minds engaged in pursuing force—the true measure of its attraction—increase from a few score or hundreds in 1838, to many thousands in 1905, trained to a sharpness never before reached, and armed with instruments amounting to a new sense of indefinite power and accuracy while they chase force into hiding places where nature herself had never known it to be. ... If science were to go on doubling or quadrupling its complexities every ten years, even mathematics would soon succumb to unintelligibility. An average mind [i.e. Adams] had succumbed already... it could no longer understand [science] in 1900.2
Henry Adams had sought to write a “social physics,” a computation of the rates of change that would be as exact as the laws of velocity. That he could not—and that no one may ever be able to do so—may be a tribute to the cantankerousness of the human being who resists being reduced to a plotted line on a paper. Yet what Henry Adams had caught—and he was, perhaps, the first man of his time to do so—was a sense of the quickening change of pace that drives all our lives. When one turns the page of his essay on “The Rule of Phase Applied to History” and confronts, for the first time in a book of history, a soaring J-curve to illustrate the exponential growth of knowledge, one feels a little as Balboa did when he climbed a peak and saw for the first time the endless expanse of the Pacific before him.
The idea of exponential curves—the acceleration of doubling rates of all kinds—has now become commonplace. We know that the time for circumnavigating the globe decreased exponentially every quarter of a century by a factor of two between Nelly Bly’s voyage around the world in 1889 and the first transworld airplane flight in 1928, and by a factor of 10 since then. Derek Price claims (in a problem we will examine later) that the amount of scientific work since Newton has doubled every fifteen years, or presumably about three times in the course of the working life of a scientist.
It is crucial to grasp that such exponential curves not only signify a rapid change in time scales, but more and more quickly transform the character of our knowledge and our lives. Caryl Haskins, the President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, wrote (in his presidential report of 1965–1966) that as late as 1920, “it was still widely believed that the Milky Way really comprehended our entire universe. Only within the last 10 years have we become fully aware that this galaxy of ours is in fact but one among millions or perhaps billions of such galaxies, lacing the heavens, stretching to distances of which the world of 1920 or even 1950 could have had little conception. ...”
Only in the past decade have we become aware of quasars (quasistellar radio sources), one of which, identified little more than two years ago, was reckoned to be about two and a half trillion times as luminous as our sun. Such findings have radically altered our ideas about the nature and extent of the universe. In fact, the rate of discovery itself in the three hundred years since Galileo has accelerated so greatly that insights attained only within the past few years have combined and welded together partial visions that required many earlier decades to achieve.
From the outer reaches of astronomy to the biological world within, the same story is repeated. A hundred years ago, the monk Gregor Mendel laid the foundation for the science of genetics. A few years later, a young biochemist named Friedrich Miescher broke down the cytoplasm of living cells with enzymes to discover the basic bonds of the nucleus. It took seventy-five years from Miescher’s work to the theoretical proposals of Linus Pauling and Robert Corey in the 1950s about the molecular structure of genes, and from there it was less than a decade before Crick and Watson deciphered the basic genetic code of life itself.
Important as any of these examples may be, the simple and crucial fact Henry Adams had so poignantly grasped in 1900 was that no longer would any child be able to live in the same kind of world—sociologically and intellectually—as his parents and grandparents had inhabited. For millennia—and this is still true in some sections of the globe, but they are shrinking—children retraced the steps of their parents, were initiated into stable ways and ritualized routines, had a common book of knowledge and morality, and maintained a basic familiarity with place and family. Today, not only does a child face a radical rupture with the past, but he must also be trained for an unknown future. And this task confronts the entire society as well.
THE CHANGE OF SCALE
The second salient fact that distinguishes our time from the past is the “change of scale” in our lives. Consider, first, the matter of numbers. It is startling to recall that when the Constitution which still guides American society was ratified, there were less than four million persons in the thirteen states of the Union. Of these, 750,000 were Negro slaves, outside society. It was a young population—the median age was only sixteen—and at that time fewer than 800,000 males had reached voting age. When George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the
United States, New York City, then the capital of the country, had a population of only 33,000.
Few people lived in cities. About 200,000 persons were settled in what were then called “urban areas”—that is, places with more than 2,500 inhabitants. Living in isolated clumps of small communities, or in sparsely inhabited areas, people rarely traveled great distances, and a visitor from afar was a rarity. Because it was an agricultural world, and artificial illumination came mainly from candles and kerosene lamps, daily life followed the orbit of the sun (“Good day” is, after all, a greeting from agricultural times), and there was little night life in the land. News meant local gossip, and the few news sheets that existed concentrated on parochial events. The ordinary citizen’s image of the world and its politics was exceedingly circumscribed.
Consider the present. Today the population of the United States is over 200 million, and more than 110 million persons live in metropolitan areas (that is, within a county containing a city of at least 50,000 residents). Few persons live or work in social isolation. (Sixty percent of the manufacturing force works in enterprises that employ more than 500 workers each.) Even those who work on farms are tied to the national society by the mass media and the popular culture.
But the most striking difference—and this is the real change of scale between 1798 and today—has to do with the number of persons each one of us knows and the number each of us knows of—in short, the way in which we experience the world. An individual today, on the job, in school, in the neighborhood, in a professional or social milieu, knows immediately hundreds of persons and, if one considers the extraordinary mobility of our lives—geographical, occupational, and social—during a lifetime one comes to know, as acquaintances or friends, several thousand. And through the windows of the mass media, and because of the enlargement of the political world and the multiplication of the dimensions of culture—the number of persons (and places) that one knows of accelerates at a steeply exponential rate.
What happens when the world’s population begins to experience this leap—in social awareness, contact, and interaction? Consider the quantum jumps in population simply in the past century. It was only in 1859, after thousands of years of social life, that the world achieved a population of one billion persons. The second billion took seventy-five years more (from 1850 to 1925), and the third billion was added only thirty-five years later, in 1960. In all likelihood, a world population of four billion will have been reached by 1980; and, if the present rates continue unchecked, a fifth billion will be added only ten years later, by 1990. As Roger Revelle points out, given present birthrates and deathrates, the population increase between 1965 and 2000 will be larger than the entire existing population. Or, to look at the doubling rates in a different light, it is estimated that, of all the people who have ever lived, one-fifth are alive today.
But a change of scale is not simply the original institution writ large. No biological organism or human institution which undergoes a change in size and a consequent change of scale does so without changing its form or shape. It was Galileo, more than three hundred and fifty years ago, who laid down this “general principal of similitude.” The great biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who described this problem in his classic On Growth and Form, put it thus:
[Galileo] said that if we tried building ships, palaces or temples of enormous size, yards, beams and belts would cease to hold together; nor can Nature grow a tree nor construct an animal beyond a certain size while retaining the proportions and employing the materials which suffice in the case of smaller structure. The thing will fall to pieces of its own weight unless we ... change the relative proportions.... 3
For Galileo, changes in proportion followed a mathematical principle, defined in normal spatial geometry as the square-cube law: as volume increases by cubic function, the surface enclosing it increases only by a square. Social institutions do not follow a fixed spatial law but, although the metaphor is biological, there is a process of structural differentiation “whereby one unit or organization differentiates into two which differ from each other in structure and in function for the system but which together are in certain respects ‘functionally equivalent’ to the earlier less differentiated unit.” 4
The concept of structural differentiation, as derived from Durkheim and Max Weber, and elaborated by Talcott Parsons and his students, is probably the key sociological concept today in the analysis of crescive social change. It points to the phenomenon that as institutions grow in size and in the functions they have to perform, specialized and distinct subsystems are created to deal with these functions. With the growth of specialized subsystems one finds as well new, distinct problems of coordination, hierarchy, and social control.
Within the context of social change, the processes of differentiation can be traced far back to early human societies in which, for example, sacerdotal and political functions that were conjoined (the Pharaonic powers of the old Egyptian kingdom) became differentiated into separate religious and political institutions (though symbolically the two were conjoined in post-Meiji Japan or even England today). Or the family, which was once the primary social institution, combining economic, welfare, recreational, and other functions, was sundered, resulting in a separation between the family and the occupational system, so that the family farm, the family business, or the family trade began to erode.
In contemporary industrial society, it has been the economic institutions that have shown the most marked form of internal differentiation. When firms and communities that were essentially alike began to meet, competition and a “heightened struggle for existence” took place. In the past, such competition often led to—in fact, was the prime cause of—war between communities. In contemporary society, because of the possibilities of economic growth through productivity, rather than through exploitation or plunder, such competition has led to a division of labor and to interdependent relationships. In order to meet competition, or to avoid going under, social units (regions, cities, firms) began to specialize, to narrow their activities, and to become complementary to one another. Just as, say, the complex process of supplying goods to larger and larger markets forced the division of trade into wholesale and retail components, so similar processes of differentiation were at work in the specialization of jobs that accompanied the growth of the economy, and of firms, as a whole. Just as one found a differentiation between ownership and management, so one found a differentiation in the tasks of management, so that production, finance, marketing, research, personnel, and the like, each became the subject of new and professionalized vocations.5
But what has been so marked and pervasive a feature of economic life now begins to appear in the once simple structures of educational and intellectual life. The growth of a university from 5,000 to 50,000 students is clearly not just a linear increase in size but a massive upheaval in structure as well. Where in the past (and this is still somewhat true of colleges in Oxford and Cambridge) one could find economic investment, administration, admissions, and teaching in the hands of one academic body, now one finds the complex hierarchy of business officials, administrators, deans, institute heads, admissions officers, and teachers existing in new and difficult bureaucratic relationships to one another. Within scientific institutions and academies of research one finds the same processes of differentiation—and strain—at work. If there is anything which, in this sense, marks off the second half of the twentieth century from the first half, it is the extension of the specialization of function from the economic to the intellectual realm.
These two concepts—the pace of change and the change of scale—are the organizing ideas for the discussion of the central structural components of the post-industrial society, the dimensions of knowledge and technology.
The Dimensions of Knowledge
THE DEFINITION OF KNOWLEDGE
When does one date a social change; when does one identify the onset of a trauma? In the case of the character of knowledge, I would place it arb
itrarily in the year 1788. The trauma: being unable to master all the relevant knowledge one needs. As the Prefatory Note to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reveals: “These earliest editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica [1745–1785] ... like all their predecessors ... had been put together by one or two men who were still able to take the whole of human knowledge for their province. It was with the Third Edition [1788] that the plan of drawing on specialist learning was first adopted.” Thus we know when the unity of knowledge was fragmented. The 1967 edition, it may be noted, had 10,000 “recognized experts” involved in its preparation.
What does one mean by knowledge? An encyclo-paedia means the whole circle, and one could take everything known (recorded or stated) as the province of this definition. For the purposes of this chapter, I shall define knowledge as a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. Thus, I distinguish knowledge from news and from entertainment. Knowledge consists of new judgments (research and scholarship) or new presentations of older judgments (textbook and teaching).
This definition is broader than some established philosophical efforts. Thus Max Scheler distinguished three classes of knowledge: Herrschaftswissen, Bildungswissen, and Erlösungswissen, or, knowledge for the sake of action or control, knowledge for the sake of non-material culture, and knowledge for the sake of salvation (in Fritz Machlup’s translation: instrumental knowledge, intellectual knowledge, and spiritual knowledge).
