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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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66. Daniel Bell

Professor Daniel Bell is a professor at Harvard University.
He was born in New York City in 1919. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1960.
Professor Bell was a writer editor of The New Leader. He was also labor editor for Fortune magazine. In 1969 he joined the faculty at Harvard. He is considered an expert in the history of radical movements in the United States.
Among his books, we mention Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), The New American Right (1955), The End of Ideology (1960), The Radical Right (1963), Towards the Year 2,000 (1968) and Capitalism Today (1971). His latest work is The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).

Do you believe that the problems of growth are entering the political consciousness of Western people? Is there a beginning in managing the future with a global point of view?

 

You terrify me by ending up with the phrase global point of view. You mentioned earlier that somebody had said that I don't think wild enough -

 

That was William Irwin Thompson of York University, Toronto.1

 

- and now you're asking me to think globally. I am not sure I can think globally in this respect. I think that by training and temperament my inclination is always never to answer a question in its own terms. I won't respond to record your question, but will try to reformulate it. I am not sure the question is growth or not growth or growth used in an abstract way, but the question is always what kinds of growth, and for whose benefit. When people say there should be ‘limits to growth,’ I don't know what they mean. When people talk about the pace of change or the acceleration of the pace of change, I really don't know what they

mean. They use these terms what we call synthetically, as intransitives, when they should be relational terms. Change of what? Growth for what?

Sometimes it is said one cannot predict the future. I tend to agree because there is no such thing as the future. These futures are different things. There are futures in technology. There are futures of particular countries. But there is no thing so abstract as growth or the future or pace of change or any of these phrases which slip so easily into discourse. My temperamental inclination, as I said, is always to say, let me try to make a distinction and then address myself to any particular dimension of the distinction that you are interested in.

 

You have written that a society that does not have its best men at the head of its institutions is a sociological and moral absurdity.2 The advance world is usually led by the mediocre and not by the top minds. How do you think we can ever get rid of this absurdity? Do we need a political redirection of our institutions? Limits to Growth talks about economics and of science and technology, but without substantially changing the direction of politics we don't get anywhere. How to improve the quality of our leadership? Can scientists influence?

 

You're asking such difficult questions. If I knew the answers, I suppose I would have written them a long time ago. What I mean is very simply this: I don't know the answer in any realistic sense. What I am trying to do is try to think about how one would begin to go about finding an answer.

I think that it is a truism and quite banal to say that any society reflects the range of distribution of its people. It's very rare that in any society the best come very easily to the top. As you know there is something called a bell-shaped curve, which is a large growth of a sort of hump and then declining. You best use it as the small end of the curve and the people who are at the top of the hump usually are the ones who're most visible and they usually are, technically, the average or the mean. It is very rare to have a society that respects excellence or greatness in this way.

To some extent this is true for the fact that we all live in a bourgeois world, and the very nature of the bourgeois world is to be antiheroic. People who in a sense posture and become heores are looked at askance. The only place where this has traditionally at all been possible has been the military, where you've had military heroes. They admire a certain degree of admiration. It's quite striking in this country, the only times

you've had leadership outside the ordinary, except for one at the crisis situations, have been essentially when you had military heroes. You've had some of the generals who've been the presidents of this country. If you go back to Washington,3 Jackson,4 Grant,5 Harrison6 or Eisenhower,7 of course they were all generals. There has been one field in a kind of growing bourgeois society which allows people of this sort to come to the top. It's very rare that you get a man who is a humble man like Lincoln,8 or a shrewd man or an aristocratic man like Franklin D. Roosevelt,9 who are able in crucial points to exercise leadership when it's required.

The problem always is what kind of rewards are created for a society. The difficulty has been that given the last two hundred and fifty years, we have created a very unique society in human history, which has been responsible for both the extreme good and the extreme bad. We created a society where the rewards were essentially material rewards. The extreme good of this is that it tends to raise the level of a large group of people who lived terribly miserable lives. I have never believed in romanticizing the past. I think people who talk about the fact that we've left nature and flipped nature are fools. The past has always been for most people in the world very terrible. One only has to read things like the statistics of mortality. Sean O'Casey - I remember his own autobiography - says that the fact is, going back only seventy, eighty years, in the Dublin slums half the children of the women died before the age of five. This was typical and is still typical in so many parts of the Third World. Clearly the whole nature of material advance has been one of the extraordinary benefits of the last two hundred years.

It also meant that we discovered a secret for increasing wealth without war. Before the 1700s and before the 1800s, most societies increased wealth essentially by plundering one another, by tax funding, by war, extortion, and this sort. Back in the early part of the middle of the eighteenth century we began to discover a new secret, called productivity, which is a technique for getting more out of less. This is the whole basis, of course, of the growth of wide-scale modern economies. This became part of bourgeois society too. It's a society which is oriented not to heroism. It's a society which is oriented not to high culture. It's a society which is oriented not to excellence, but essentially to material reward - and the motivations of the people who are at its heads.

 

Bourgeois society after 1815 managed to grow at the expense of the Third

World. Without the resources from the Third World we in Western Europe would never have grown the way we have been growing.

 

No, that's not really true. I am not an economic historian. Perhaps I am out of my depth here, but to a considerable extent the Third World never entered into any of the economies of the advanced industrial societies until the end of the nineteenth century, and even then didn't begin to do so in any substantial way. Certainly there is very little substantial trade with the Asian societies. There is some amount of gold taken from Latin America. Our majorities of economic growth between 1750 and 1890 were not at all in relation to the Third World. I am not clear that all trade with the Third World - which itself seems a very loose term - is essentially negative, or simply exploitative in this particular way. It depends upon the particular place and time and country.

The Third World is a very loose term and unfortunately a very poor one. I think any generalization made which tries to encompass all of Africa, all of Asia and all of Latin America as the Third World is completely misleading and probably does them more harm than any good. Latin America after all became politically independent in the middle of the nineteenth century. It entered into the world economy in the middle of the nineteenth century. My major point is to hold that economic growth as it began in the Western world, particularly Western Europe and the United States, was quite independent of the other segments of the world and to that extent it didn't depend upon developing nations. The major finding it seems to me was the whole import, of course, of the technological revolution, like steam, then electricity and the whole way in which the world transformed from that.

But let me go back to what's involved here, which is the cultural setting. Because what you did was to ask a very unique question in a way, which people very rarely ask. You took a question like limits to growth and then you asked a second question about the quality of leadership. Very few people ever join up what is seemingly a technical-economic-ecological-resource question with a sociological-psychological-cultural question. What I am trying to do is to join your two questions in a kind of a thread. What does join them is that they're both part of an economic civilization whose values are primarily economic and whose mould is created by bourgeois society.

The positive side of it is essentially the fact that we have had an extraordinary rise in standard of living, with the Third World in a sense

envying us and they now want to emulate us. But at the same time we in the West saw a rise of a class whose motivations were primarily material rewards, whose motivations were not primarily scholarly, or for intellectual or aesthetic achievements. Historically speaking, I suppose this is - I hate to use the word - the price one pays. I don't think anyone ever sat down and said, Would I belong and pay that kind of price. But this was in fact, as they say in the jargon of sociology, the functional component of the economic sphere. To that extent, I still think of myself sufficiently of a Marxist to say that economics and culture become joint. They join or lock together in a common quality which is essentially here the creation of a new kind of economic civilization. These economic civilizations had both their positive and negative sides. Their positive sides have been the extraordinary explosions of economics and technology. Their negative side has been that they had a class of persons and leadership who normally reflected the highest of human achievements.

 

Are we moving towards more diversity? Are we moving towards a Skinner10 method of programming the environment in order to get better people? Are we being pushed toward what John F. Kennedy once coined ‘voluntary totalitarianism’? Are we moving away from ‘individual excellence,’ as you would call it?

 

Let me not comment on Skinner, because I think that complicates the problems. Skinner deals more on a - what you might call it - a micro-level of society. I think the prevailing tendency - which has been accelerating, if you will, in the last hundred and fifty years - is that we move towards an increasing diversity. What is striking about any modern society is - if you look at this, let's say in Toynbeean terms - is what makes the management of any large-scale society so difficult, to manage the large number of multiple interests which have generated in a society as huge and as complex as it is. You have cultural intelligentsia, scientific intelligentsia, collective farm managers, army people, factory people, planters, what you have got is a multiplication of interests. At the same time you have a multiplication of cultural styles, which cannot be completely resisted. We now have not just obviously a global world, both economically and technologically. You have also an intellectual and cultural globality, which hardly means that you have homogeneity. What we do have here in many ways is the classical illustration of Rome during the time of Constantine, which is what used to be called syncretism.

You have a mingling and jostling of strange gods. People can choose. One thing which upsets people constantly is the fact that their children choose very differently from themselves.

I think to this extent there is an extraordinary situation, an extraordinary explosion, if you will, of diversity in the world and the openness to different styles of life, to different ways of choosing the way in which one wants to live. At the same time there is a different kind of pressure which creates the tension in the world, namely, the increasing need for regulation. If we talk of limits to growth, already you begin to mean that one wants to limit the population of a society. Which means one bars people from having more than three children. Or one can do so effectively by either taxing them, or making it more difficult to simply have more children. One can tax certain kinds of luxury - things like air conditioning - to cut down on use of electric energy. Inevitably we will have a world in which you have, as the economists would call it, more and more externalities. More and more spillover will be generated, which affects everybody else and the result is that one needs more regulation. A hundred years ago perhaps one could drive with horse and buggy down the road and not worry about anybody else. Today you have regulated traffic lights which break the flow of traffic.

One sees here an extraordinary historical problem. People want to be more and more different and encourage multiplicity and diversity. But the very fact of multiplicity and diversity means that you need more and more degrees of regulation, controls, orderliness, in order to allow for that kind of diversity. People don't always want to realize that it becomes a necessary condition for their survival in this particular way. I have always remembered a very shrewd remark of Bertrand de Jouvenel, many years ago, in which he said, ‘people double their income, they don't feel they're twice as well off as they were before.’ I think this is one of the important considerations at stake. People double their income and they demand more things. What happens of course is that in France, during the month of August, everybody goes down to the Riviera. Everyone goes down to Lake Annecy, which once was an unspoilt and very pleasant place. It then becomes a hearth of congestion simply by the multiplication of numbers. If you were to say to a Frenchman, ‘You must not take your vacation in August,’ he says, ‘You are interfering with individuality.’ That may well be, but if you don't interfere with individuality, everybody will then be standing in a crowd, hip and thigh next to each other on the coast of the blue azure.

Kant wrote that from such crooked wood as human beings are made, nothing exactly straight can be constructed. What is your view of our years ahead?

 

Since I believe in ending in paradox, I'll tell you a story: Once a man was asked, Are you an optimist or a pessimist? He replied, ‘I'm an optimist.’

‘If you're an optimist, why are you scowling?’ The man retorted, ‘Because I don't think my optimism is justified.’


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