The Cold Society

Four O'Clock on a pleasant May afternoon in 1964. Screams freeze a crowded Bronx street. And there she is, in a doorway, naked: a slight young woman trying to fight off a rapist who had begun his assault on the floor above--her eyes blackened, bruises on her neck, blood running from her mouth. Part of the crowd bestirs itself. Some 40 people move closer to the doorway to get a better look. The rapist starts dragging her up the stairs. No one else moves. Until finally two cops appear and race to the rescue. The next day, a businessman on the street, who had watched the event, shrugs when asked why he hadn't intervened. "You look out for yourself today," the citizen says.

Two days later, in Atlantic City, there are screams from two nine-year-old boys, drowning in a bay. Fifty spectators, silent, watch as one man tries to save them. He fails. Why didn't some of the onlookers jump in to help? "Nobody," mutters one of them, "wanted to get involved."

Two months before, Catherine Genovese, returning from work late at night to her home in Kew Gardens, Queens, was attacked and stabbed by a man on a well-lighted street, within a hundred feet of her apartment. Her screams, it was later established, awakened 38 of her neighbors. Twice, as apartment lights went on, the attacker scurried away. Twice he came back, and finally killed her. Not one of the 38 called the police during the 35 minutes between the first attack and the last, although Miss Genovese kept yelling, "Please help me! Please help me!"

The next day, when newsmen asked her neighbors why they had been immobile, a dentist in the building next door to Miss Genovese's was bitter. "You reporters don't care about me," he complained. "Do you realize that my patients, the women, are afraid to come up here now? It's bad for business. And besides, how do you know that the girl is not somebody's wife? Everybody looks out for themselves."

Predictably, in an age as scientific and sophisticated as our own, psychiatrists and sociologists participated in a post-mortem examination of the apathy that was an accomplice in the death of Catherine Genovese. Psychiatrist Iago Galdston proclaimed: "I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis in which we live, which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual from the group." Dr. Renée Claire Fox, an associate professor of sociology at Barnard College, was more intricate in her diagnosis. The silent 38, she explained, had manifested a "disaster syndrome"--similar to the withdrawal into themselves by victims of such sudden disasters as tornadoes. Hearing a prolonged murder under their windows had destroyed their feeling that the world was "a rational, orderly place, shaking their sense of safety and sureness." Rounding out the board of examiners was a theologian who lived in the neighborhood: "I can't understand it. Maybe the depersonalizing here has gone further than I thought." Having revealed that much of his anxiety, he added hastily, "Don't quote me."

The depersonalizing had indeed gone further than he and most of us had thought. The case of Catherine Genovese is hardly atypical, and despite the feverish soul-searching that followed it, the odds are that residents of her neighborhood would not today react in significantly different fashion to a similar act of violence outside their windows.

The terms--"alienation" and "depersonalization"--used by those trying to understand the death of community that led to the death of Catherine Genovese have become imbedded in the common language of our time. Alienation, defined by Eric and Mary Josephson in Man Alone, is a "feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others and from the world at large." A man who is alienated, added Dr. Karen Horney, is remote from his own feelings, wishes, beliefs (continued on page 136) Cold Society (Continued from page 133) and energies. He has lost the feeling of being an active, determining force in his own life.

Confused about his own identity and his own values, he is also less and less certain that the world is "a rational, orderly place." In The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society, Kenneth Keniston, assistant professor of psychology at Yale Medical School, points out: "There has seldom been so great a confusion about what is valid and good.... More and more men and women question what their society offers them and asks in return.... The prevailing images of our culture are images of disintegration, decay and despair; our highest art involves the fragmentation and distortion of traditional realities; our best drama depicts suffering, misunderstanding and breakdown; our worthiest novels are narratives of loneliness, searching and unfulfillment; even our best music is, by earlier standards, dissonant, discordant and inhuman."

He continues: "Despite the achievements of many of the traditional aspirations of our society, we commonly feel a vague disappointment that goals that promised so much have somehow meant so little real improvement in the quality of human life. Whatever the gains of our technological age, whatever the decrease in objective suffering and want, whatever the increase in our 'opportunities' and 'freedoms,' many Americans are left with an inarticulate sense of loss, of unrelatedness and lack of connection."

And, as this feeling of a "lack of connection" spreads, there is an increase in another element of alienation--anomie. The term, first used by French sociologist Emile Durkheim, means the collapse of rules of conduct, the condition of rootlessness. The result of anomie on one level is increased crime, violence, mental illness and sexual deviation.

On another level, anomie is represented by the capacity to accept "the unthinkable." As standards of conduct, personal and national, disintegrate, the implications of the H-bomb, for example, become part of the "normal" fabric of society. Already conditioned by the mass genocide committed by the Nazis, not even religious leaders bestirred themselves to concerted opposition when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. And, by now, the very real danger of a nuclear holocaust is accepted as a fact of life. We see and are titillated by Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, but a residue of cold, resigned fear stays like a lump inside. An "accident" could occur. A confrontation with China could occur.

A psychologist, Dr. Robert Clifton, studied the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and found that a "unique" lasting effect of the disaster was "a loss of faith or trust in the structure of existence, and psychologically speaking, no end point, no resolution." Unique to Hiroshima? The loss of trust "in the structure of existence" is hardly limited to the physical survivors of Hiroshima.

Among America's young, for instance, the possibility that the world may quite literally break apart is seen by many of them as a virtual certainty. Chicago broadcaster Studs Terkel tapes a notuntypical conversation with the parents of a nine-year-old girl. "It bothers our daughter," the woman says. "It really does. And to have these remarks come out at home out of a clear blue sky: 'I wish I'd never been born. If the bomb is going to hit, I'm going to enjoy life while I can. I'll do what I please.' Oh, what an answer! And what can you say?"

CBS surveys the nonrebellious 16-year-olds of Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. Seventy-eight percent have bank accounts of their own. Ninety-nine percent know who Dick Van Dyke is, but only 20 percent can identify Ho Chi Minh. And yet more than half of those 688 16-year-olds consider it likely they will live to see a nuclear war.

The signs of alienation, of anomie ("I'll do what I please"), are particularly evident among youth. There is increasing withdrawal through the use of drugs. There is the growing number of what novelist-social critic Jeremy Larner calls "the cool ones" who "do not look to the adult world for models. That world is seen as a hostile and artificial place, full of squares who make pointless distinctions of class and race, who work at useless jobs, who give themselves pompous airs, who try to make you as unhappy as they are themselves.... It's not hip to take the grown-up world seriously. It's hip to put up with it passively and to use one's own private time in search of experience which will make one inwardly superior. And putting up with it passively is easier with the judicious use of drugs."

When you're high, you're out of reach. "You're in your own world," one Greenwich Village drug taker says in The Village Voice. "That out there is life and this over here is me. And there's no connection. Drugs are just another way of alienating yourself. Narrowing yourself, down from the world, from society, from your parents.... That alienation could have manifested itself in many ways. I might have become a holdup man instead. Everybody has his own way of dealing with his hang-ups. What about those housewives who take two pills to go to sleep and two more to wake up?"

The New York Times recently reported that teenaged fighting gangs have all but disappeared in the city; according to the Times, there hasn't been a rumble in central Harlem or Williamsburg in more than four years. Though the Times did not cite cause and effect, it noted that drug taking has increased substantially in these four years, and it reported official disturbance over "the terrible sense of disaffiliation, cynicism and apathy" that now seems to grip ghetto youth.

There are also signs in the music of the young, in the intensifying focus on what Simon and Garfunkel call, in their hit single, The Sounds of Silence. This song is about cities where people talk without speaking and hear without listening. Other songs fix a cold eye on the verities and virtues of their parents' world, as in the Animals' We Gotta Get Out of This Place--"See my daddy in bed a-dyin', see his hair turnin' gray, he's been workin' and slavin' his life away. He's been workin', workin', work, work."

There are signs of alienation and acute restlessness in the changed statistics of suicide among both the young and their elders. We talk comfortably of the allegedly high rates of suicide in the Scandinavian countries, but suicide is now the ninth leading cause of death among men in the United States. Among Americans from 18 to 45, it is the fourth-ranking cause of death. Among teenagers, the suicide rate has risen 50 percent in the past ten years. Child suicides, adds the National Education Association, are increasing at an alarming rate, and now approach two a day.

We read of the activists in the colleges, but there are also the lonely. "You can see their loneliness," says Dr. Rita V. Frankiel, acting director of the Columbia College Counseling Service, "in their lack of personal emotionality, and in the fact that there are so many wearing dark glasses. They feel there is a danger in face-to-face contact and personal involvement. They are the lonely children of lonely parents. Alienated lonely people breed alienated lonely people."

There are signs in the persistent concern of such social critics as Paul Goodman that we are rapidly losing a sense of community, a sense of being an organic part of where we work, where we live, where we try to love. And this sense of community becomes vaguer and vaguer as cities grow bigger and suburbs become more crowded.

The apathy of Catherine Genovese's neighbors was neither singular nor atypical. Nor is it restricted to large American cities. A. M. Rosenthal, former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now its metropolitan editor, emphasizes: "Indifference to one's neighbor and his troubles is a conditioned reflex of life in New York as it is in other big cities. In every major city in which I have lived--in Tokyo and Warsaw, Vienna and Bombay--I have seen over and over again people walk away (Continued on page 277) Cold Society (Continued from page 136) from accident victims. I have walked away myself."

A district attorney in Queens looks at a reporter questioning him on public apathy and barks, "They talk about an Affluent Society, a Great Society, a Free Society. You know what we really are, chum? We're a Cold Society."

While the sense of community withers, however, so does the sense of personal identity. And the feeling of being an active, determining force in one's own life also diminishes. As Goodman says, people are becoming personnel. In an acceleratingly rationalized, pervasively systematized society, we are numbered--quite literally. Count the numbers through which your existence is proved--by machines.

But, at least, we like to believe, there is security in the system itself--the machines do work, the systematized cities do function, the subways do run on time. A central tenet of the new religion of technology is that the system cannot break down. But what if it does? All electricity stopped in New York City for 13 hours in November 1965. People, said the news reports, reacted remarkably well. They were friendlier than usual. They didn't panic. Who says we've lost a sense of community?

Later, however, the reports of social scientists began to appear. Two of them, Arthur and Norma Sue Woodstone, asked in the Herald Tribune's New York magazine, "In the Blackout and Transit Strike, How Did New Yorkers REALLY Act?" Quoting from their own and others' studies, they disclosed that "trapped underground, in a black, claustrophobic box in labyrinthian corridors at the height of the city's homeward rush, amid strangers and potential 'ethnic stresses,' the New Yorker barely spoke to his reluctant companion. He often remained seated while ladies stood. If he was standing, he didn't even make himself more comfortable by sitting on the floor or by removing his shoes and wiggling his toes. Instead, he clung to the same strap for hours or with six others struggled for a grip on the pole near the door.... The truth is... the New Yorkers locked in their streamlined sarcophagi were not calm. They were...'passive.' They were practically catatonic."

Add, then, what will increasingly become a new source of fear, of rootlessness, of insecurity--the Panovsky Law, herewith named after Dr. Wolfgang K. H. Panovsky, director of the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford. Panovsky warns: "As society becomes more efficient and automated, it inevitably becomes more vulnerable to chaotic disruption."

By the year 2000, predicts scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, "People will be living underground in skyscrapers going straight down instead of up. This will totally eliminate the weather problem--but will increase the possibility of great disasters. Can you imagine what would happen if a great public utility--the Con Ed of the year 2000--should have a power failure? Millions of people could die from lack of air."

And even when the system is working, how much place remains for the spontaneity of individuality? When "communicating" with others, we more and more are trying to manipulate each other, and in the process we are often ourselves manipulated in turn. "Fake personalization," observes psychoanalyst Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, "has replaced real regard for persons."

Alone, in the midst of atomized crowds, we hardly have the space or the chance to even be alone physically. To be private. "Retirement into solitude," adds Ruitenbeek, "has ceased to be an opportunity offered by daily life. Where besides the bathroom can man go to be by himself?"

And, in fact, as population explodes, there is a new term--"mental pollution"--referring to causes of alienation and disintegration, personal and societal. In March 1966, the World Health Organization cited the very noise of cities as a major element in mental pollution: neighbors shouting, television sets playing at full blast and motor traffic, which in itself "so substantially contributes to nervous disease, insomnia, nervous tension, ill temper and accidents."

Beleaguered by noise and crowding, city dwellers, added Dr. Arie Querido, president of the National Federation of Mental Health of the Netherlands, increasingly plunge inward into neuroses, or act out their alienation in cold violence. "Is the city population," he asks, "approaching the state of rats, which, under conditions of experimental crowding, start fighting and devouring each other?"

Further contributing to the alienation and fragmentation of the individual is his sense of being caught up in the swift developments of technology, developments most of us do not understand and could not change if we did. It is not only the bomb that may determine whether we live or die, but also all the other ambivalent "wonders" created by impersonal science. There is every likelihood, for one example, that heredity can now be shaped through control of the genetic code. But who will set the standards? Who will be the breeders? In addition, as science probes more deeply into the brain, more and more forms of behavior are going to be increasingly controllable.

In 1945, J. Bronowski, a scientist, and a team of colleagues examined what was left of Nagasaki and its people after the bomb had been dropped. Bronowski wrote: "Each of us in his own way learned that his imagination had been dwarfed.... The power of science for good and evil has troubled other minds than ours. We are not here fumbling with a new dilemma; our subject and our fears are as old as toolmaking civilizations. Nothing happened except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man." (Emphasis added.)

It is that indifference of power to man--the power of the state, the power of economic forces, the power of science--that has been felt with chilling impact in this century. More in this century than in the 19th because the scale of that indifference has indeed changed. And the corollary of that coldness is man's estrangement from himself, and then from his society.

"Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote nearly 50 years ago. "The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Not yet "mere anarchy," because, paradoxically, the society is ever more organized; but certainly there is growing concern as to how much control the scientists and the technologists themselves have over the power they are multiplying. "During the past two centuries," notes English social scientist Sir Geoffrey Vickers, "men gained knowledge and power" that they used "to make a world increasingly unpredictable and uncontrollable. The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed without a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings ever nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost."

Or, put another way, technical knowledge is outrunning social intelligence, and the individual is swept along.

In a rapidly changing, rootless society, frustrations feed on fantasies. One psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph S. Banay, has linked the confusion of fantasy with reality--a confusion heightened by persistent television violence--to the immobility of Catherine Genovese's neighbors on her final night. The murder, he says, gratified the sadistic impulses of the silent witnesses. "They were paralyzed, hypnotized with excitation, fascinated by the drama, by the action, and yet not entirely sure that what was taking place was actually happening."

And anomie transcends class divisions. Consider the study of a group of delinquent youngsters, 13 to 17 years old, in Manhassett, Long Island. All come from families with incomes of from $10,000 to $30,000 a year. They represent what the Germans call Wohlfahrtskriminalität --the criminality of prosperity. Their fathers, according to group psychotherapist Norman Epstein, in his report to the American Group Psychotherapy Association, "usually described how they had attempted to impress upon their sons the necessity for diligence, perseverance, social responsibility and respect for the golden rule."

But the boys heard their fathers boast of "shady business conquests, of truancy and sexual prowess in boyhood" and other forms of behavior directly contrary to parental precepts. These middle-class youngsters, finding it difficult to reject the real example given by their fathers, "felt hopeless about becoming a person of worth." Yet they couldn't blame their fathers. "How can you be mad," asked one of the youngsters in the study, "at a man who gives you a car and a TV set, but doesn't give you guidance, decency and honesty?" The middle-class youngster is confronted with parental pressures for conformity while being supplied with permission to chart a course of evasion.

The term "course of evasion" touches only the surface of the void. When one of the fathers bragged at home about his conquests in the business jungle ("the suckers are so easy to take"), he was the very personification of the chilled rootlessness of many of his contemporaries--and of his children.

Among the young, the result, when not delinquency, when not escape into drugs, is the cool self-interest that characterizes more and more of those who are "making it." Psychoanalyst Robert Coles has worked with the poor, the delinquent and the affluent, specializing in the young. Describing the similarities between lawbreaking ghetto youngsters and many middle-class "achievers," Coles says of the latter: "They are interested in their own welfare, and relentlessly pursue its achievement. Their actions are not so crude, not illegal, but their self-involvement is no less striking, and their essential disinterest in 'others'...no less obvious."

The reasons for the rise of alienation and anomie--now seen most clearly in the young--go back to the qualitative changes during the past two centuries in the ways men live and work. Certainly there was insecurity before the Industrial Revolution, but it existed, when it did exist, within a clearly ordered system of values and within a community that was organized on a human scale. Most people grew up within close-knit families that were also strongly interrelated productive units. Furthermore, man was usually involved in the total realization of his work. There was satisfaction in creating entities rather than in being an interchangeable fragment of an assembly line in a huge factory or a huge office.

Everything--production, distribution, even war--was human-size. As for the imponderable questions of the ultimate meaning of life and death, man relied on faith and on God. It was a purposeful universe. Nature was present as part of the total order of existence, and man's contacts with nature were constant and intimate.

Nor was man especially mobile, except in times of war. He was usually rooted for life to a place, to expanding generations of a family, to a category. But when the feudal system disintegrated and man found himself able to move--socially and geographically--his problems of identity in a rapidly changing world began.

By the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, it was possible for more and more men to conceive of themselves as individuals apart from their social categories. For a time, however, the anxieties of individuality were compensated for by the challenge of an open-ended society.

But as the rate of industrialization increased, that feeling of infinite possibility ended for large masses of people. Packed into growing cities, they lost control over the totality of their work and over the pace at which they worked. They became extensions of the machines. As Hannah Arendt puts it, "Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the normal rhythms of his body to their mechanical movement." Alienated from his work, he became alienated from other men, because his basic link with them had become the commodities they produced or exchanged.

Even those who didn't become mechanized, who turned into small entrepreneurs or remained craftsmen, were subject to huge, impersonal economic and political forces, forces that could determine whether they survived or failed without reference to the quality of their services or their skills, let alone their needs. If there was an economic order in this new world, it was an order they could neither understand nor control.

At the same time, faith in the ultimate order of the universe and one's place in it also began to crack. The all-encompassing unity of medieval Catholicism was split. Protestantism insisted that man face God alone and for a long time taught that man is inherently evil. Isolated at work, isolated in the city, man was also isolated before God--and unworthy besides. Gradually, as man's identity in the secular world became more and more splintered, he found it harder and harder to find God, because science told him that in time there would be no mysteries. All was secular. All was material. All could be dissected and then controlled.

But in science, too, the center would not hold. In this century there emerged Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy, which showed there are limits to knowing and predicting physical states. And Godel found that every system of mathematics is doomed to incompleteness. And the atom--the ultimate reality we know--has been discovered to be invisible. "The universe," concluded J. B. S. Haldane, one of the most brilliant scientists of the century, "is not only queerer than we imagine--it is queerer than we can imagine." Thus no universal laws can be found; only pragmatic formulas for particular questions. Man will never be able to grasp the universe as a whole. Kant was right. There are limits to reason, too. "We have tried to storm heaven," said mathematician Hermann Weyl, "and we have only succeeded in piling up the tower of Babel."

Other gods of this century have failed. Marxism was to provide the means to so analyze and control the secularized society that man eventually--through the class struggle and historical determinism--would achieve the utopia of a classless society. The agent of change would be the revolutionary working class. But in the West, even in the socialist parties of Europe, the working class has become a partner in the mixed economic order, asking for a larger share of the Gross National Product, but basically content with the structure of ownership and production.

The poor remain as possible vindicators of Marx' prophecy, but they are not organized in any meaningful way to force fundamental change, nor is there any historical precedent that they can be. They are not powered by any unifying ideology, certainly not by Marxism. And there is every likelihood that they will in time be absorbed and mollified by the expanding welfare state. In the underdeveloped countries, in China--if there is not world-wide cataclysm--softening materialism will gradually foreclose the last chance for Marx' utopia.

Another bankrupt deity is Freud. Through psychoanalysis, man was to discover more and more of the full range and depth of his being. And by being in contact with his irrationality--that force Marx neglected to recognize--man would be able to control it, sublimating aggression and other potentially destructive drives into constructive pursuits. The flaw is that psychoanalysis often obscured and dampened individuality, rather than liberating the psyche. As Irving Howe describes the usual middleclass analysand, "You go to your analyst to be smoothed down, to be eased off, to be rounded out--not so that you will live up to the image of yourself, which is being frustrated in your social life, but rather so that you will abandon that image of yourself and learn to conform to the images which society imposes upon you."

In a particularly shrewd perception, Michael Wood, an English social scientist, wrote in the periodical New Society about the isolating effect of psychoanalysis. In the vocabulary of that wistful science, "one talks about one's insecurity, one's anxieties as if they were alien bodies--the mutinous members of a not very well suited federation."

The rhetoric continues that the subconscious, if it is understood, can be a source of liberation. But, Wood adds, this is how psychoanalysis actually works: "The people, the disturbances are always right, and the conscious mind is seen as a kind of fascist guard: the author of an elaborate, lying construct; the enemy of the real self.... Morality now is fidelity to the subconscious, to the real, the sincere you. The problem is that you yourself are going to be the last person to know about the real you, because your conscious mind is not on your side.... In this shifting, Pirandellian world, neither the self nor the society is a reality, and the inhabitants of this world can only be the most confirmed of relativists."

Split apart by the Age of Industrialization, man was to be put back together again by psychoanalysis. But the gospel of Freud has served for the most part to alienate man even further--from himself and his society. A poignant American phenomenon now is the sizable number of the middle aged returning to an analyst a decade or more after having "finished." The first "treatment" bound up some wounds, but, it became increasingly clear, the patient's identity remained elusive, ghostlike. They return for a last chance at finding the center of themselves, but there is small evidence that the ghost of self will be made flesh.

With no core of certainty in religion, in science, in historical determinism, in psychoanalysis, Western man has also experienced the disintegration of his last fortress--the family. With the coming of industrialization, the family was no longer a coherent economic unit. For the father, the home became separated from the place of work. No longer in control of his work, he was less and less in control of his home. Even in bed.

The rights of women now include female as well as male orgasm; and if the man fails to fulfill that right, his sense of self, already weakened at work, is further assaulted. Kinsey found that some 45 percent of all the married men he interviewed considered themselves inadequate in their sexual performance. And impotence is hardly a rare occurrence in American marriages.

The wife, increasingly well educated, is either imprisoned at home with little chance to fulfill her expectations of herself, or she, too, is out in the world of work, further blurring her children's definition of male and female roles. The sexual identity of "man's work" is itself increasingly blurred. In Western society, Hendrik Ruitenbeek points out, "passivity, compliance and manipulation are traditionally regarded as female characteristics." Now, "with the declining role of direct production and the increasing importance of marketing activities, ability to do, to control things, has become less important as a way of achieving success than ability to manipulate persons."

Emasculated at work, father is also emasculated at home. Consider the television "domestic comedies" of the past decade in the light of Dagwood as seen by Marshall McLuhan in his 1951 book, The Mechanical Bride: "Dagwood is a supernumerary tooth with weak hams and a cuckold hairdo.... Dagwood is seedy, saggy, bewildered, and weakly dependent.... He is an apologetic intruder into a hygienic, and, save for himself, a well-ordered dormitory. His attempts to eke out some sort of existence in the bathroom or on the sofa (face to the wall) are always promptly challenged. He is a joke which his children thoroughly understand."

But they don't understand it thoroughly enough to be sure what they are sexually. In dress, it becomes more and more difficult to tell the sexes of the young apart. Writes Jane Tamerin in the New York Herald Tribune:

There was a day when men weremen and women all wore dresses,

But now the girls are wearing pantsand the men are bedecked withtresses.

So, Buddy, tease those curly locks,relax and just enjoy it;

You'll look pert in your floweredshirt, while your girlfriend triesto boy it.

At a showing of men's sportswear held early this year by the J. M. Fields discount stores, the models were girls. And women, in the past year, have increasingly taken to wearing pants and suits, which more and more men find sexually provocative.

Homosexuality, as can be seen in most large cities, appears to be increasing. In any case, it is certainly more open. And as contrasted with the homosexuals of a decade ago, the majority of today's recruits do not swish and are, in fact, quite difficult to distinguish from their heterosexual contemporaries at work, in the Army or in the colleges.

For those of the young whose sexual proclivities are "normal," there is a marked increase in what one appalled educator calls "genital, not human sex." In an article, "Pop Sex," in The Village Voice, Marlene Nadle has observed: "In our cool world, feelings have been eliminated by choice and incapacity. Bodies have become things to be cultivated, like the announcer's voice that persuades us we can sell our iridescent fingernails and squeaky-clean hair to the boy next door. And sex has become just a huge, swinging, pop-art image: simplified, often repeated, and isolated from everything else.

"There are perennial understudies," she continues, "playing one-nighters waiting for their chance at love. One girl explained, 'When there is nobody around who matters, sometimes you just have to reach out to somebody. Physical contact is better than no contact at all, although it can make things worse.... People have to have sex as a way to approach one another because they don't know how to get through another way.' For the generation after the sexual revolution, casual sex doesn't seem to be much of a question. But it doesn't seem to be much of an answer, either."

Less and less secure about his own identity, even in the act of "love," modern man is unsure--and uncaring--about the identities of others. In his own life, there are more people--contacts, clients, service personnel--but fewer persons. He shuts himself off from the pain of others; and those he does not see, he takes only the most transient notice of. The slums of our cities are as remote and alien to him as the mountains of Tibet. The aged are in separate housing and increasingly in separate cities. Three quarters of the American aged of all colors live in abject poverty, removed from the rest of the "community" as if they were already dead.

It is not that man is inhuman. In his alienation from himself and others, he has become a human. The Germans have been accused of criminal passivity while millions were murdered in their concentration camps. But other nations of the world knew what was happening, and only a small number offered asylum while there was still time. In the final desperation of the Jewish revolt in the Warsaw ghetto, not even medical supplies were dropped to the besieged by the Allies. As for the Nazis themselves, the horror of the Eichmann trial was that Eichmann was not a monster, different in kind from the rest of man. "Half a dozen psychiatrists," Hannah Arendt wrote, "had certified him as 'normal.' One found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brother, sisters and friends, was 'not only normal but most desirable'--and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison...reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be 'a man with very positive ideas.' "

And what has been learned from the a human bestiality of the Nazis? Simone de Beauvoir, speaking of the years of French acts of torture in Algeria, exclaimed: "We have hated the Nazis when they tortured and oppressed us, and we were in the Resistance. We don't understand: the people who have been in the Resistance now do the same thing to the Algerians that the Germans did to us." The Germans had been alienated from themselves and others; now, those who had survived the ruthless anomie of the Third Reich were themselves transformers of self-alienation into bestiality. Cold in their violence, they felt no human relationship with their Algerian victims. Torture and death were impersonal.

The depersonalization of victims continues. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary on the war in Vietnam shows an American pilot caught up in the excitement of doing his job efficiently. His job is dropping napalm bombs. Over the intercom, exulting on his mission's success in driving the enemy into the open, he grins and says, "This is fun."

Warren Rogers, a columnist for the Hearst syndicate, writes from Vietnam: "There is a new breed of Americans that most of us don't know about, and it is time we got used to it. The 18- and 19-year-olds fashionably referred to as high school dropouts have steel in their backbones and maybe too much of what prize fighters call the killer instinct. These kids seem to enjoy killing Viet Cong."

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What of the future? If the world does not explode, will the society become colder, even more depersonalized? Although arguments continue on the effect of cybernation (computer-directed automation) on job availabilities, there is consensus that the use of the computer will accelerate. And as it does, our present highly organized society will become even more tightly systematized.

Those in power will be those able to speak to the computers, to program them. Meanwhile, computers have started to talk among themselves. There are already self-programing machines that often do more than has been asked of them and are therefore unpredictable. By 1960, the late Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor who invented the word "cybernetics," was able to write about computers that "unquestionably show originality and most definitely escape from the completely effective control of the man who has made them." Computers, moreover, are designing other computers.

Whoever is in control--the technocrats, the machines, or both in an uneasy partnership--can have unprecedented power over the rest of the population. A perilous decline in privacy and in the quality of other civil liberties is all too likely.

Now, as Robert H. Davis, director of the Learning Service at Michigan State University, points out, "Privacy depends as much upon the technical inefficiency of our innumerable information systems as on the concept of the individual's rights. Often we know little about one another, not because the data is unavailable, but because it is so scattered. There are great pressures to centralize and organize the data because it would greatly facilitate the business of the state. Before the invention of the general-purpose computer, the idea of a central electronic dossier on every individual in the country was impracticable. Today, however, it is technically quite feasible."

A mild example of what might very well happen is described in The World in 1984 by Dr. M. V. Wilkes, Universal Mathematical Laboratory, Cambridge University: "How would you feel if you had exceeded the speed limit on a deserted road in the dead of night, and a few days later received a demand for a fine that had been automatically printed by a computer coupled to a radar system and a vehicle-identification device? It might not be a demand at all, but simply a statement that your bank account had been debited automatically. Many branches of life will lend themselves to continual computer surveillance."

Right now, as John Pemberton, Jr., national executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, emphasized in The Playboy Panel: Crisis in Law Enforcement (March 1966), privacy is being invaded with increasing subtlety. "Our technological revolution is spawning dozens of new eavesdropping devices every year. Sooner or later, inevitably, miniature television transmitters like the ones in Dick Tracy will be developed and we will have entered the era of 1984 with Big Brother's eye on us day and night. And don't think certain police officials will hesitate to use it. In California they even bugged a bedroom shared by the speaker of the California Assembly and his wife. Any assumption that wire tapping and eavesdropping has been or will be confined to criminals is naïve."

Nor is only wire tapping on the rise. "Surveillance technology" includes the growingly sophisticated use of personality testing, "truth serums," brain-wave analysis and closed-circuit television.

If, however, new generations are born into a society in which individuality, spontaneity and privacy are increasingly rare, might they not take these cold but firmly directed rules of the game for granted? If there is not a nuclear war, material wants will be filled by the omnipresent welfare state. "It is by no means impossible," Donald Michael projects in The Next Generation, "that those growing into and out of [such a society] will be at least as comfortable and content as we are with our world. After all, many people now live indifferently, apathetically ... with decaying cities, racial inequities, megaton weapons and the population explosion, as members of the bureaucratic rat race, with their private lives on file, and so on through a catalog of society's failures which would have depressed a reader of an earlier day."

It is equally possible that in such a world, anxiety-creating alienation and anomie can be done away with. Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, foresees within the next 30 years pharmaceuticals able to change and maintain the personality at any desired level. Removed from even the semblance of decision-making concerning their work and the operations of the state, the population at large will be able to go further and further inside themselves, searching after new sensations, including new sexual experiences, through the use of cheap, safe, nonhabit-forming chemicals. The Age of Kicks will have arrived.

But the thrust for individuality, for spontaneity without drugs, for the right and power to make basic decisions about one's own life remains. In East Germany, a young poet, Wolf Biermann, is in trouble with the state because of poems subversive of what the East German press calls "the new age." Poems like:

I don't want to see anyone!

Stop standing there!

Don't stare!

The collective is wrong.

I am the individual.

The collective has isolated itself

From me.

The odds against the Biermanns, East and West, are high and are growing higher. But there is some justification for hope that the man of the future may not be entirely conditioned by the computer-powered state, by his other rationalized institutions or by drugs.

Significantly, today's dissenting young in the West are pressing not only for an end to poverty and war, but just as urgently, for decentralization of decision-making, for radical changes in the nature of education, for new, more humane definitions of work. Unlike their counterparts of the 1930s, they are radically questioning the Welfare State in its present, nascent form, and are working toward ways by which men can live in dignity as well as in economic security. They form "community unions" in the ghettos in which the decision-making is by "participatory democracy." No one stays in a position of leadership permanently. Identities are forged and strengthened through existential, non-manipulative contacts with others.

Moreover, it is possible, say educational theorists John Holt and Paul Goodman, to so educate generations to come as to reverse the alienating effect of contemporary education. There is a case to be made that despite all the forces contributing to alienation--from the bomb to the dissolving family--the next generations could preserve and expand their individualities if school were not a lock step of accelerating pressures to be "right" and thereby to get into the "right" schools and the "right" jobs.

As of now, John Holt maintains in How Children Fail, our schools "fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding and creating with which children were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives." Man is still perfectible.

If, as Marshall McLuhan hopes, the whole educational system can change from instruction to discovery, with the students as researchers, man in the Age of Cybernation may be able to find a center of identity and the beginning of a returned sense of community. Technology can bring unprecedented abundance, but it need not necessarily further atomize man in his materialistic comfort. If technology is democratically controlled and if the abundance it creates is allocated to human resources--such as a massive radicalization of the schools--the increased leisure it will bring can be so creative as to be infinitely more fulfilling than most of what has been known as work up to now.

John R. Platt, associate director of the Mental Research Institute at the University of Michigan, sounds the possibility that "continuing education for much of the population may become a lifelong activity.... Many adults may fix up a laboratory room in their houses, where they can work every day at some scientific project, some study in crystallization or in embryology ... that could offer a lifetime of unfolding discovery."

Others would be able to explore the creative arts. And not only on Sunday. Man would again be interconnected with nature, for, says Platt, "nature is infinite to us, for it includes the human brain itself. After all the myriad galaxies of the astronomers are charted as well as we want to chart them, we will still go on studying the multimyriad complexities of the brain that has measured them." Not--if the society is humane and its members organically interrelated--in order to control others, but to learn and fulfill our own capacities.

In satisfying and deepening contact with himself, man would thereby be able to relate to others without withdrawal or fear. He might even know joy again. "One of the hardest things in this century," says actor-writer Eddie Albert, "is to be truly joyful; I don't mean pleasure; I mean joy. To know pure delight. They knock it out of you too soon."

But for technology to be transformed into a humanistic utopia--where the joy of discovery will have full play--power will have to be regained by humanists. Also essential is the humanization of scientists in the manner of Norbert Wiener, who in 1947 disdained a fortune by refusing to engage in "defense" work or in the kind of work in private industry that was aimed only at the further piling up of materialistic goods in a cycle of depersonalized consumption.

It is exceedingly difficult to be optimistic that these intersecting changes in political power, in education, in the self-image of scientists will take place. But the struggle to be human does continue. What individualistic joy remains, says octogenarian Norman Thomas, is the acceptance of challenge, the refusal to regard any obstacle--even the cold thrust of the technological society as it is now--as insuperable.

Albert Camus, the most humanistic of the existentialist writers, would have agreed with Thomas. Life is absurd, he concluded, but that does not mean that when one chooses to remain alive one cannot live meaningfully. "Metaphysical pessimism," he insisted, "does not necessarily require that one should despair of man. For instance, the philosophy of the absurd does not exclude the political thought directed toward the perfection of man and deriving its optimism from the notion of relativity."

Precisely because there are no absolutes, no fixed natural laws, no fixed laws of history, no fixed laws of human nature or of the capacity for human growth, man can keep trying to create a society in which he can be free without being fearful of his freedom, in which he can be an individual but not isolated from others, in which he remains in control of himself and his machines.

Increasingly, among the activist young, there is the further conviction that even if it proves impossible on a broad scale to achieve community without conformity, individuality without anomie, at least the struggle itself may make life valuable and self-identity possible.

"The reward," says young folk singer-composer Phil Ochs, "is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. In other words, even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life."

Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society and long an organizer of community unions in poor sections of Newark, also feels that even if "winning" isn't possible, there are alternatives to despair, alienation, passivity or conformity for those committed to a radical change in the nature of the cold society.

Hayden uses the word "radicalism" not in terms of political ideology but rather to denote ways of getting at the root of man. Until 1984 does arrive, says Hayden, "the alternative might be for radicalism to make itself ordinary, patiently taking up work that has only the virtue of facing and becoming part of the realities which are society's disgrace. Radicals then would identify with all the scorned, the illegitimate and the hurt." Radicals would persistently ask the depersonalized majority, "Who is criminal? Who is representative? Who is delinquent?"

Radicalism--others might call it humanism--would then "give itself to, and become part of, the energy that is kept restless and active under the clamps of a paralyzed imperial society. Radicalism," Hayden concludes, "would then go beyond the concepts of pessimism and optimism as guides to work, finding itself in working despite odds. Its realism and sanity would be grounded in nothing more than the ability to face whatever comes."

If even this alternative, and other alternatives, turn out not to be possible, we have the vision of Jacques Ellul, the pre-eminent critic of runaway technology: "When the edifice of the technical society is completed, the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam."