by Daniel Bell
3. Time-savers. Since “free time” becomes more and more previous: the little of his non-work time and relatively more of his income from work. He will buy items that he can use and then throw away. He will “contract out” various services or maintenances (as he now sends cloths to the dry cleaners). And to do this he may have to work longer in order to acquire the kinds of goods and services that give him a high yield on his non work time. But the cost may be too high and he has to begin to reckon his trade -offs. He must calculate relative price and yields from different allocations of time and money. He may find that because of high maintenance cost he will do his own laundry or dry cleaning in a self-service store, thus spending part of his time to save money. Or he may want to spend money to save time. In balancing these considerations be begins to plot (without knowing that he is doing technical economics) an indifference curve of differential scales of substitution (of time and money) and the marginal utility of each unit of satisfaction in the different sectors of his expenditures. Low yields have to be transferred to high yields until, at the end, his resources have been so efficiently distributed as to give him an equal yield in all sectors of use Economic abundance thus reintroduces utility by the back door of time, in his leisure time, has become homo economicus.
In cruel fashion. Cropia thus stands confounded.137 The end of scarcity, as it was envisaged by nineteenth-century writers, would bring such a plethora of goods that man would no longer need to delay his gratifications or live like a calculating machine. Men could throw prudence to the winds, indulge their prodigal appetites, and live spontaneously and joyously with one another.
And yet it has all been turned around. Industrial society is spectacularly devoted to the production of things (and man’s dependence upon them). But in the post-industrial society, the multiplication of things, and their rising custodial costs, brings time into the calculus of allocating one’s personal activities; men become enslaved to its measurement through marginal utility.
In Utopia (as in the market economy) each man was free to pursue his own interest, but in the post-industrial society—where the relation among men (rather than between man and nature, or man and things) becomes the primary mode of interaction—the clash of individual interests, each following its own whim, leads necessarily to a greater need for collective regulation and a greater degree of coercion (with a reduction in a personal freedom) in order to have effective communal action. And when individuals demand full participation in the decisions that affect their lives, the consequence is an increase in information costs and in the time required for bargaining each against each in order to reach agreement on action.
The end of scarcity, it was believed—the leap from the kingdom of necessity—would be the freeing of time from the inexorable rhythm of economic life. In the end, all time has become an economic calculus. As Auden put it, “Time will say only, I told you so.”
5. Culture and Consciousness
What is common to all sociological thought today is the sense of a profound transformation in industrial society. Some writers have focused on structural and social combinations—the new science-based technology, the change in sectors of the economy, the shifts in the occupational system and the like—and see in these permutations the major source of all other shifts in the society. From this viewpoint, the changes in values and attitudes, particularly the anti-scientism of the youth and the intellectuals, are seen as “counter-revolutionary.” Other writers—Norman O. Brown, Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, and their epigones such as Charles Reich and Theodore Roszak—place the transformation of the society in consciousness: a new polymorph sensuality, the lifting of repression, the permeability of madness and normality, a new psychedelic awareness, the exploration of pleasure.
Formulated in these contrasting ways, the changes invariably raise the question, Which of these changes is primary—social structure or culture—and which is the initiating force? Paradoxically, those who emphasize the economic and structural changes, in the traditional Marxist method, are labelled conservative and technocratic, while those who emphasize the autonomy of consciousness—the realm of ideology—are called revolutionary.
The difficulty with this confrontation is not the correctness of each description—to considerable degree both are right—but the effort to force a conclusion. Such efforts, methodologically, derive from the prevailing view in sociology that society is integral: in Hegel’s sense, an organic whole; or as Marx put it, that a single organizing institution (e.g. commodity production) frames the entire society; or that, as Weber would have it, a common mode of life (e.g. rationalization) permeates all aspects of behavior.
For Hegel, every society is a structurally interrelated whole, organized through a single “moment” (a state of historical development) of consciousness. No aspect of that whole can be understood as an isolated phenomenon. Marx, in his famous formulation, declared that “The sum total of [the] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.” 138 And Weber believed that “In the last resort the factor which produced capitalism is the rational permanent enterprise, rational accounting, rational technology and rational law, but again not these alone. Necessary complementary factors were the rational spirit, the rationalization of the conduct of life and a rationalistic economicethic.139
Of the great synoptic efforts in contemporary sociology to create a theory of society, we find Sorokin emphasizing the role of unitary “mentalities” (e.g. the “sensate” and the “ideational”), or Parsons emphasizing values as the ordering principle which in hierarchical fashion shapes all the other components of social structure, namely norms, collectivities, and roles. Thus, all the major sociological figures have, in one way or another, understood society as a unity of social structure and culture.
Contrary to these conceptions, what has been happening in Western society for the past hundred years, I believe, is a widening disjunction between the social structure (the economy, technology, and occupational system) and the culture (the symbolic expression of meanings), each of which is ruled by a different axial principle. The social structure is rooted in functional rationality and efficiency, the culture in the antinomian justification of the enhancement of the self.
The sources of each impulse are quite different. The “life-style” of the social structure was shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time, and a linear sense of progress. All of this derived, fundamentally, from the effort to master nature by technics, to substitute wholly new rhythms of life for those bound to the regularities of the season and the diminishing returns of the soil. Technical mastery was in turn fused with a character structure which accepted the idea of delayed gratification, of compulsive dedication to work, of frugality and sobriety, and which was sanctified by the morality of service to God and the proof of self-worth through the idea of respectability. To this extent, bourgeois society of the nineteenth century was an integrated whole in which culture, character structure, and economy were infused by a single value system. This was the civilization of capitalism at its apogee.
Ironically, all this was undermined by capitalism itself. Through mass production and mass consumption, it destroyed the Protestant ethic by zealously promoting a hedonistic way of life. By the middle of the twentieth century capitalism sought to justify itself not by work or property, but by the status badges of material possessions and by the promotion of pleasure. The rising standard of living and the relaxation of morals became ends in themselves as the definition of personal freedom.
The result has been a disjunction within the social structure itself. In the organization of production and work, the system demands provident behavior, industriousness and self-control, dedication to a career and success. In
the realm of consumption, it fosters the attitude of carpe diem, prodigality and display, and the compulsive search for play. But in both realms the system is completely mundane, for any transcendent ethic has vanished.
If the modern social structure—based as it is on technics and metrics—is a distinctively new kind of social organization in human history, then contemporary culture, in its concern with the self, combines the deepest wellsprings of human impulse with the modern antipathy to bourgeois society.
The antinomian dimension of culture has been a recurrent feature of human society, in which the dialectic of restraint and release was played out originally in religion and then in the secular moral order itself. The antinomian attitude, in fact, is the repeated effort of the self to reach out “beyond”: to attain some form of ecstasy (ex-stasis, the leaving of the body); to become self-infinitizing or idolatrous; to assert immorality or omnipotence. Its source is the finitude of crea-turehood and the denial by the self of the reality of death. It is the radical “I” asserting its imperishable survival against imperious fate. One finds this expressed in ancient times in the Dionysian revels, and in early Christian times in a gnosticism which thought itself absolved of obligation to the moral law. In modern society this psychological solipsism reacted most sharply against the efforts of bourgeois society to impose repressive constraints on the spontaneous acting-out of impulsive desires. The nineteenth-century antinomian impulse found its cultural expression in such anti-bourgeois attitudes as romanticism, “dandyism,’ “estheticism,” and other modes that counterposed the “natural man” to society, or the “self” against society. The theme expressed most radically in such writers as Baudelaire, Lautreamont, and Rimbaud is that of the “authentic” self, free to explore all dimensions of human experience and to follow those impulses regardless of convention and law.
What in the nineteenth century was private and hermetic has become, in the twentieth-century effulgence of modernism, public and ideological. Contemporary culture, with the victory of modernism, has become anti-institutional and antinomian. Few writers “defend” society or institutions against the “imperial self,” to use Quentin Anderson’s citation. The older artistic imagination, however wild or perverse, was constrained by the shaping discipline of art. The new sensibility breaks down all genres and denies that there is any distinction between art and life. Art was formerly an experience; now all experience is to be turned into art.
These anti-bourgeois values, on the levels of ideology and consciousness, go hand in hand with the expansion of a new intellectual class huge enough to sustain itself economically as a class, and with the emergence of a large new youth movement which seeks expression and self-definition in altered states of consciousness, cultural rebellion, and enormous personal freedom. What has emerged, coincident in time, is both an “adversary culture” and a “counter-culture.”
The adversary culture derives historically from the modernist movement and carries the flag of anti-bourgeois values. It draws upon the realm of imagination and art, and particularly the different kinds of experimental and “difficult” art which gave such vitality to literature, music, painting, and poetry in the first decades of the twentieth century. What such art does, primarily, is to break up the “rational cosmology” of ordered time and space, of sequence and proportion, of foreground and background, of distance and control, which had been the esthetic modes of organizing experience from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Through modernism, the antinomian impulse has captured the highbrow culture of literature and the arts.
The counter-culture is a revolution in life-style which sanctions the acting-out of impulse, the exploration of fantasy, the search for polymorphic pleasure in the name of liberation from restraint. It proclaims itself “daring” and in revolt against bourgeois society. But in fact bourgeois culture vanished long ago. What the counter-culture has done is to extend the double tendencies of cultural modernism and capitalist marketing hedonism initiated sixty years ago. It seeks to take the creed of personal freedom, extreme experience, and sexual experimentation into areas where the liberal culture—which would accept such ideas in art and imagination—is not prepared to go. Yet the liberal culture finds itself at a loss to explain its reticence. It approves a basic permissiveness, but cannot with any certainty define the bounds. And it leaves the moral order in a state of confusion and disarray. For this reason liberalism may yet suffer a reaction.
Ideas and cultural styles do not change history—at least, not overnight. But they are the necessary preludes to change, since a change in consciousness—in values and moral reasoning—is what moves men to change their social arrangements and institutions.
This is the cultural dilemma of capitalist society: it must now acknowledge the triumph (albeit tempered) of an adversary “ideology,” the emergence of a new class which sustains this ideology, and the collapse of the older value system which was, ironically, undermined by the structural transformation of capitalism itself. The inimical ideology is not the secular socialism of the working class—if anything, the working class covets ever-expanding goods and production—but the cultural chic of “modernism” which retains its subversive thrust however much it is absorbed by the system. This new class, which dominates the media and the culture, thinks of itself less as radical than “liberal,” yet its values, centered on “personal freedom,” are profoundly anti-bourgeois. The value system of capitalism repeats the old pieties, but these are now hollow because they contradict the reality, the hedonistic life-styles promoted by the system itself.
Like any chiasmus in culture, the cross-over cannot be pinpointed at a particular moment of time. The ideological roots go back to the literary cenacles of a hundred or more years ago, the changes in the life-style promoted by capitalism fifty years ago, and the expansion of the new intellectual class within the last decade. A cultural crisis cannot be resolved, like a political problem, by the inclusion or exclusion of a particular social group; it lies deep in the character of the values which sustain or fail to sustain a system. For this reason the cultural paradox is a continuing crisis of capitalist society.
In a post-industrial society, the disjunction of culture and social structure is bound to widen. The historic justifications of bourgeois society—in the realms of religion and character—are gone. The traditional legitimacies of property and work become subordinated to bureaucratic enterprises that can justify privilege because they can turn out material goods more efficiently than other modes of production. But a technocratic society is not ennobling. Material goods provide only transient satisfaction or an invidious superiority over those with less. Yet one of the deepest human impulses is to sanctify their institutions and beliefs in order to find a meaningful purpose in their lives and to deny the meaninglessness of death. A post-industrial society cannot provide a transcendent ethic—except for the few who devote themselves to the temple of science. And the antinomian attitude plunges one into a radical autism which, in the end, dirempts the cords of community and the sharing with others. The lack of a rooted moral belief system is the cultural contradiction of the society, the deepest challenge to its survival.140
THE POLITY AS ARBITER
The post-industrial society is a crescive, unplanned change in the character of society, the working out of the logic of socio-economic organization, and a change in the character of knowledge. At some point, the major social groups in society become conscious of the underlying social transformation and have to decide, politically, whether to accept the drift, accelerate it, impede it, or change its direction.
Politics, in contemporary society, is the management of social structure. It becomes the regulative mechanism of change. But any political decision necessarily involves some conception of justice, traditional, implicit, and now increasingly explicit. Men accept different principles of justice, or different hierarchies of value, and seek to embody them in social arrangements. Ultimately the differences between social systems lie not in their soc
ial structures (the arrangements of reward and privilege around the organization of the economy) but in their ethos. Capitalism was not just a system for the production of commodities, or a new set of occupations, or a new principle of calculation (though it was all of these), but a justification of the primacy of the individual and his self-interest, and of the strategic role of economic freedom in realizing those values through the free market. This is why the economic function became detached from other functions of Western society and was given free rein.
The political ethos of an emerging post-industrial society is communal, insofar as social goals and priorities are defined by, and national policy is directed to, the realization of those goals. It is sociologizing rather than economic (in the sense discussed in Chapter 4), insofar as the criteria of individual utility and profit maximization become subordinated to broader conceptions of social welfare and community interest—particularly as the ancillary effects of ecological devastation multiply social costs and threaten the amenities of life.
For this reason, the political system in post-industrial society can never be wholly technocratic. In a highly technical society, the “technicians”—using that word in the broad sense of those having specialized knowledge—will be the main source of innovation because of their professional expertise. The power to initiate—to direct the attention of society to particular possibilities of action—becomes enormously important: Like the scientists who during World War II created nuclear weapons, they are aware of the potentials in the changes in theoretical knowledge and the specialized technologies that flow from these discoveries; they can codify knowledge, direct new invention, create new methods of analysis, calculate the costs and consequences of policies and the like. The “power” to innovate, as Herbert Simon has pointed out, does not fit the classical categories of power or influence; and it is a real force in the society.141 But it is not the power to say “yes” or “no,” which is where real power lies.
