Future Shock
Page 8
FLAMENCO IN SWEDEN
Perhaps the most psychologically significant kind of movement that an individual can make is geographical relocation of his home. This dramatic form of geographical mobility is also strikingly evident in the United States and the other advanced nations. Speaking of the United States, Peter Drucker has said: "The largest migration in our history began during World War II; and it has continued ever since with undiminished momentum." And political scientist Daniel Elazar describes the great masses of Americans who "have begun to move from place to place within each [urban] belt ... preserving a nomadic way of life that is urban without being permanently attached to any particular city ..."
Between March 1967 and March 1968 – in a single year – 36,600,000 Americans (not counting children less than one year old) changed their place of residence. This is more than the total population of Cambodia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Tunisia combined. It is as if the entire population of all these countries had suddenly been relocated. And movement on this massive scale occurs every year in the United States. In each year since 1948 one out of five Americans changed his address, picking up his children, some household effects, and starting life anew at a fresh place. Even the great migrations of history, the Mongol hordes, the westward movement of Europeans in the nineteenth century, seem puny by statistical comparison.
While this high rate of geographical mobility in the United States is probably unmatched anywhere in the world (available statistics, unfortunately, are spotty), even in the more tradition-bound of the advanced countries the age-old ties between man and place are being shattered. Thus the New Society, a social science journal published in London, reports that "The English are a more mobile race than perhaps they thought ... No less than 11 percent of all the people in England and Wales in 1961 had lived in their present usual residence less than a year ... In certain parts o€ England, in fact, it appears that the migratory movements are nothing less than frenetic. In Kensington over 25 percent had lived in their homes less than a year, in Hampstead 20 percent, in Chelsea 19 percent." And Anne Lapping, in another issue of the same journal, states that "new houseowners expect to move house many more times than their parents. The average life of a mortgage is eight to nine years ..." This is only slightly different than in the United States.
In France, a continuing housing shortage contrives to slow down internal mobility, but even there a study by demographer Guy Pourcher suggests that each year 8 to 10 percent of all Frenchmen shift homes. In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate of domestic migration appears to be on the rise. And Europe is experiencing a wave of international mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II. Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except in England) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.
They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Every Friday afternoon 1000 Turkish workers in Istanbul clamber aboard a train heading north toward the promised lands. The cavernous rail terminal in Munich has become a debarkation point for many of them, and Munich now has its own Turkish-language newspaper. In Cologne, at the huge Ford factory, fully one-quarter of the workers are Turks. Other foreigners have fanned out through Switzerland, France, England, Denmark and as far north as Sweden. Not long ago, in the twelfth-century town of Pangbourne in England, my wife and I were served by Spanish waiters. And in Stockholm we visited the Vivel, a downtown restaurant that has become a meeting place for transplanted Spaniards who hunger for flamenco music with their dinner. There were no Swedes present; with the exception of a few Algerians and ourselves, everyone spoke Spanish. It was no surprise therefore to find that Swedish sociologists today are torn by debate over whether foreign worker populations should be assimilated into Swedish culture or encouraged to retain their own cultural traditions – precisely the same "melting pot" argument that excited American social scientists during the great period of open immigration in the United States.
MIGRATION TO THE FUTURE
There are, however, important differences between the kind of people who are on the move in the United States and those caught up in the European migrations. In Europe most of the new mobility can be attributed to the continuing transition from agriculture to industry; from the past to the present, as it were. Only a small part is as yet associated with the transition from industrialism to super-industrialism. In the United States, by contrast, the continuing redistribution of population is no longer primarily caused by the decline of agricultural employment. It grows, instead, out of the spread of automation and the new way of life associated with super-industrial society, the way of life of the future.
This becomes plain if we look at who is doing the moving in the United States. It is true that some technologically backward and disadvantaged groups, such as urban Negroes, are characterized by high rates of geographical mobility, usually within the same neighborhood or county. But these groups form only a relatively small slice of the total population, and it would be a serious mistake to assume that high rates of geographical mobility correlate only with poverty, unemployment or ignorance. In fact, we find that men with at least one year of college education (an ever increasing group) move more, and further, than those without. Thus we find that the professional and technical populations are among the most mobile of all Americans. And we find an increasing number of affluent executives who move far and frequently. (It is a house joke among executives of the International Business Machine Corporation that IBM stands for "I've Been Moved.") In the emerging super-industrialism it is precisely these groups – professional, technical and managerial – who increase in both absolute number and as a proportion of the total work force. They also give the society its characteristic flavor, as the denim-clad factory worker did in the past.
Just as millions of poverty-stricken and unemployed rural workers are flowing from the agricultural past into the industrial present in Europe, so thousands of European scientists, engineers and technicians are flowing into the United States and Canada, the most superindustrial of nations. In West Germany, Professor Rudolf Mossbauer, a Nobel prizewinner in physics, announces that he is thinking of migrating to America because of disagreements over administrative and budgetary policies at home. Europe's political ministers, worried over the "technology gap," have looked on helplessly as Westinghouse, Allied Chemical, Douglas Aircraft, General Dynamics and other major American corporations sent talent scouts to London or Stockholm to lure away everyone from astrophysicists to turbine engineers.
But there is a simultaneous "brain-drain" inside the United States, with thousands of scientists and engineers moving back and forth like particles in an atom. There are, in fact, well recognized patterns of movement. Two major streams, one from the North and the other from the South, both converge in California and the other Pacific Coast states, with a way station at Denver. Another major stream flows up from the South toward Chicago and Cambridge, Princeton and Long Island. A counter-stream carries men back to the space and electronics industries in Florida.
A typical young space engineer of my acquaintance quit his job with RCA at Princeton to go to work for General Electric. The house he had purchased only two years before was sold; his family moved into a rented house just outside Philadelphia, while a new one was built for them. They will move into this new house – the fourth in about five years – provided he is not transferred or offered a better job elsewhere. And all the time, California beckons.
There is a less obvious geographical pattern to the movement of management men, but, if anything, the turnover is heavier. A decade ago William Whyte, in The Organization Man, declared that "The man who leaves home is not the exception in American society but the key to it. Almost by definition, the organization man is a man who left home and ... kept on going." His characterization, correct then, is even truer today. The Wall Street Journ
al refers to "corporate gypsies" in an article headlined "How Executive Family Adapts to Incessant Moving About Country." It describes the life of M. E. Jacobson, an executive with the Montgomery Ward retail chain. He and his wife, both forty-six at the time the story appeared, had moved twenty-eight times in twenty-six years of married life. "I almost feel like we're just camping," his wife tells her visitors. While their case is atypical, thousands like them move on the average of once every two years, and their numbers multiply. This is true not merely because corporate needs are constantly shifting, but also because top management regards frequent relocation of its potential successors as a necessary step in their training.
This moving of executives from house to house as if they were life-size chessmen on a continent-sized board has led one psychologist to propose facetiously a money-saving system called "The Modular Family." Under this scheme, the executive not only leaves his house behind, but his family as well. The company then finds him a matching family (personality characteristics carefully selected to duplicate those of the wife and children left behind) at the new site. Some other itinerant executive then "plugs into" the family left behind. No one appears to have taken the idea seriously – yet.
In addition to the large groups of professionals, technicians and executives who engage in a constant round of "musical homes," there are many other peculiarly mobile groupings in the society. A large military establishment includes tens of thousands of families who, peacetime and wartime, move again and again. "I'm not decorating any more houses," snaps the wife of an army colonel with irony in her voice: "The curtains never fit from one house to the next and the rug is always the wrong size or color. From now on I'm decorating my car." Tens of thousands of skilled construction workers add to the flow. On another level are the more than 750,000 students attending colleges away from their home state, plus the hundreds of thousands more who are away from home but still within their home state. For millions, and particularly for the "people of the future," home is where you find it.
SUICIDES AND HITCH-HIKERS
Such tidal movements of human beings produce all sorts of seldom-noticed side effects. Businesses that mail direct to the customer's home spend uncounted dollars keeping their address lists up to date. The same is true of telephone companies. Of the 885,000 listings in the Washington, D. C., telephone book in 1969, over half were different from the year before. Similarly, organizations and associations have a difficult time knowing where their members are. Within a single recent year fully one-third of the members of the National Society for Programmed Instruction, an organization of educational researchers, changed their addresses. Even friends have trouble keeping up with each other's whereabouts. One can sympathize with the plaint of poor Count Lanfranco Rasponi, who laments that travel and movement have destroyed "society." There is no social season any more, he says, because nobody is anywhere at the same time – except, of course, nobodies. The good Count has been quoted as saying: "Before this, if you wanted twenty for dinner, you'd have to ask forty – but now you first ask 200."
Despite such inconveniences, the overthrow of the tyranny of geography opens a form of freedom that proves exhilarating to millions. Speed, movement and even relocation carry positive connotations for many. This accounts for the psychological attachment that Americans and Europeans display toward automobiles – the technological incarnation of spatial freedom. Motivational researcher Ernest Dichter has unburdened himself of abundant Freudian nonsense in his time, but he is shrewdly insightful when he suggests that the auto is the "most powerful tool for mastery" available to the ordinary Western man. "The automobile has become the modern symbol of initiation. The license of the sixteen-year-old is a valid admission to adult society."
In the affluent nations, he writes, "most people have enough to eat and are reasonably well housed. Having achieved this thousand-year-old dream of humanity, they now reach out for further satisfactions. They want to travel, discover, be at least physically independent. The automobile is the mobile symbol of mobility ..." In fact, the last thing that any family wishes to surrender, when hardpressed by financial hardship, is the automobile, and the worst punishment an American parent can mete out to a teen-ager is to "ground" him – i.e., deprive him of the use of an automobile.
Young girls in the United States, when asked what they regard as important about a boy, immediately list a car. Sixty-seven percent of those interviewed in a recent survey said a car is "essential," and a nineteen-year-old boy, Alfred Uranga of Albuquerque, N. M., confirmed gloomily that "If a guy doesn't have a car, he doesn't have a girl." Just how deep this passion for automobility runs among the youth is tragically illustrated by the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin boy, William Nebel, who was "grounded" by his father after his driver's license was suspended for speeding. Before putting a .22 caliber rifle bullet in his brain, the boy penned a note that ended, "Without a license, I don't have my car, job or social life. So I think that it is better to end it all right now." It is clear that millions of young people all over the technological world agree with the poet Marinetti who, more than half a century ago, shouted: "A roaring racing car ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory."
Freedom from fixed social position is linked so closely with freedom from fixed geographical position, that when super-industrial man feels socially constricted his first impulse is to relocate. This idea seldom occurs to the peasant raised in his village or the coalminer toiling away in the black deeps. "A lot of problems are solved by migration. Go. Travel!" said a student of mine before rushing off to join the Peace Corps. But movement becomes a positive value in its own right, an assertion of freedom, not merely a response to or escape from outside pressures. A survey of 539 subscribers to Redbook magazine sought to determine why their addresses had changed in the previous year. Along with such reasons as "family grew too big for old home" or "pleasanter surroundings" fully ten percent checked off "just wanted a change."
An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are beginning to form a recognizable sociological category of their own. Thus a young Catholic girl in England gives up her job selling advertising space for a magazine and goes off with a friend intending to hitchhike to Turkey. In Hamburg the girls split up. The first girl, Jackie, cruises the Greek Islands, reaches Istanbul, and at length returns to England, where she takes a job with another magazine. She stays only long enough to finance another trip. After that she comes back and works as a waitress, rejecting promotion to hostess on grounds that "I don't expect to be in England very long." At twenty-three Jackie is a confirmed hitch-hiker, thumbing her way indefatigably all over Europe with a gas pistol in her rucksack, returning to England for six or eight months, then starting out again. Ruth, twenty-eight, has been living this way for years, her longest stay in any one place having been three years. Hitchhiking as a way of life, she says, is fine because while it is possible to meet people, "you don't get too involved."
Teen-age girls in particular – perhaps eager to escape restrictive home environments – are passionately keen travelers. A survey of girls who read Seventeen, for example, showed that 40.2 percent took one or more "major" trips during the summer before the survey. Sixtynine percent of these trips carried the girl outside her home state, and nine percent took her abroad. But the itch to travel begins long before the teen years. Thus when Beth, the daughter of a New York psychiatrist, learned that a friend of her's had visited Europe, her tearful response was: "I'm nine years old already and I've never been to Europe!"
This positive attitude toward movement is reflected in survey findings that Americans tend to admire travelers. Thus researchers at the University of Michigan have found that respondents frequently term travelers "lucky" or "happy." To travel is to gain status, which explains why so many American travelers keep ragged airline tags on their luggage or attache cases long after their return from a trip. One wag has suggested that someone set up a business washing and ironing old ai
rline tags for status-conscious travelers.
Moving one's household, on the other hand, is a cause for commiseration rather than congratulations. Everyone makes ritual comments about the hardships of moving. Yet the fact is that those who have moved once are much more likely to move again than those who have never moved. The French sociologist Alain Touraine explains that "having already made one change and being less attached to the community, they are the readier to move again ..." And a British trade-union official, R. Clark, not long ago told an international manpower conference that mobility might well be a habit formed in student days. He pointed out that those who spent their college years away from home move in less restricted circles than uneducated and more home-bound manual workers. Not only do these college people move more in later life, but he suggested, they pass on to their children attitudes that facilitate mobility. While for many worker families relocation is a dreaded necessity, a consequence of unemployment or other hardships, for the middle and upper classes moving is most often associated with the extension of the good life. For them, traveling is a joy, and moving out usually means moving up.
In short, throughout the nations in transition to super-industrialism, among the people of the future, movement is a way of life, a liberation from the constrictions of the past, a step into the still more affluent future.
THE MOURNFUL MOVERS
Dramatically different attitudes, however, are evinced by the "immobiles." It is not only the agricultural villager in India or Iran who remains fixed in one place for most or all of his life. The same is true of millions of blue-collar workers, particularly those in backward industries. As technological change roars through the advanced economies, outmoding whole industries and creating new ones almost overnight, millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers find themselves compelled to relocate. The economy demands mobility, and most Western governments – notably Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States – spend large sums to encourage workers to retrain for new jobs and leave their homes in pursuit of them. For coalminers in Appalachia or textile workers in the French provinces, however, this proves to be excruciatingly painful. Even for big-city workers uprooted by urban renewal and relocated quite near to their former homes, the disruption is often agonizing.