A Little Knowledge
Steinfels, Peter
Warning: This Column Emanates from the Knowledge Industry. The Surgeon General Has Determined That Reading It May Be Dangerous to Your Moral Health. Not long ago it seemed that some popular...
...Greeting cards, stationery, and carbon paper for the office are equally part of Machlup's knowledge industry...
...They are "affluent professionals, secular in their values and tastes and initiatives, indifferent to or hostile to the family...
...Any calm examination of these figures makes the emergence of the knowledge industry a good deal less formidable than the 35 percent of GNP that Novak asserts so knowingly, or the "30 to 40 percent" that Kevin Phillips prefers...
...Is there a knowledge industry...
...I use Novak's column as an example only because it is handy--he evidently thought enough of it to reprint it in his "ethnic millions" newsletter...
...However, in light of their determination to maintain their language, and the mixed reaction to this from the rest of the country, one could be excused for believing secession to be inevitable...
...The affluent professionals in this field can be held accountable for numerous failings, not excluding selfaggrandizement and arrogance...
...This position takes two basic forms: an active bias or reaction against measures designed to strengthen or protect Frenchspeakers' rights, or simply an apathy towards what happens to Quebec...
...Much more of this is badly needed and could only help to improve the situation no matter what the ultimate outcome is...
...But Machlup is an economist, us24 June 1977:392 ing economic categories and not the political ones that most critics of the knowledge industry have in mind...
...In fact, we badly need some sensible perspective on the "knowledge industry" and the related notion of an expanding technical-professional "new class...
...So is the postal service and the telephone system...
...JOHN L. MCKENZIE 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 Steinfels (Crest...
...At the very least, such widespread division over basic realities points ahead to troubled times...
...everyone agrees is the politically significant element of this knowledge industrythe media, the professoriate, and the intellectual elite the picture is hardly one of "cultural nihilism...
...Naturally enough, having resisted assimilation for two centuries, most French-speakers are determined to continue doing so...
...So are spectator sports like Novak's beloved pro football...
...One of the sectors of the knowledge industry, for example, that has expanded dramatically in recent years (thanks to government subsidy) is medicine, a bulwark of what passes for traditionalism...
...Are the elite intellectuals cultural nihilists...
...Except that his economist's definition of education encompasses Sunday Schools and basic training in the Marines as well as grade schools, colleges and universities...
...The growth of a knowledge industry and a technical-professional "new class" is one of the most important developments of our recent history...
...A column last August in the Washington Star claimed that "over 35 percent of the GNP is now supplied by the knowledge industry: federal and local government workers, researchers, lawyers, planners, consultants, educators, information systems operatives, journalists, social workers and others...
...Of course there is, and it has grown considerably more powerful in recent decades...
...A series of studies found that elite intellectuals and media figures ranked "culture and values" as an important problem facing America in exactly the same position as did the business elite, those in the administrative branch of government, leaders of voluntary associations, and the public at large (and somewhat higher than did labor leaders...
...Some insuit but little injury is done thereby to the relatively well-off operatives of the knowledge industry and the affluent members of the "new class...
...The "knowledge industry" was becoming the newest bugaboo of the conservative mentality...
...The Indian reductions of Paraguay were victints of the dedicated and singularly small-minded secularism of the major Catholic nations of Europe in the eighteenth century...
...Is Fran Tarkington in the tow of the Know-Everythings--along with your postman...
...but they hardly fit Novak's description of decadent, anti-family Know-Everythings, at odds with the American public...
...The objects of these studies are found to be distinctly more liberal than the American public at large but by no means radical...
...It is true that most Quebecers, at this time, do not want to secede, principally because of the uncertain economic effects of such a move...
...As far as I can tell, it is an updating of the conclusion reached by Fritz Machlup in his pioneering work on The Production and Distribution o~ Knowledge in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1962...
...The Jesuits diet patronize the Indians...
...Bishop does not indicate whether or not he thinks Quebec will secede from Canada to form its own Frenchspeaking nation...
...Machlup's calculation of the percentage of GNP attributable to the knowledge industry even includes all the money spent on conventions--yes, on drinks, too --whether of the American Association of University Professors, the Baptist Youth Fellowship, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Banking Association, or the Camp Fire Girls...
...But the Jesuits did not exploit the Indians...
...Some recent Jesuit critics, C. tells us, have said that they managed the reductions as if they were Jesuit conlmunities...
...Machlup estimated that "total knowledge production in 1958 was almost 29 percent of adjusted GNP...
...In their own way they were devoted to the Indians as people...
...At the moment its status in the public prints is much like that of white ethnics some years ago, before writers like Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Andrew Greeley, and Novak himself, began to make an impact: anyone (including, ironically enough, these same writers) feels free to toss off an impression as fact and turn a class of people into a whipping boy...
...However, official policy (bilingualism), supported by all political leaders, is opposed to such assimilation...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued 1tom page 387) trayed, by the leaders of the nation's political parties...
...The author went on to insist that the political leaders of this social force are "secular Know-Everythings...
...They were agents of the Spanish mon...
...Bishop's stands out distinctly...
...Since August, the election of Jimmy Carter has cooled and confused the "knowledge industry" has receded our domestic cultural conflicts, and A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE PETER STEINFELS somewhat as the object of conservative criticism, a condition which is probably temporary...
...It is rather easy from this point of view to say that the Jesuits were so deeply enmeshed in politics that the work could not have succeeded...
...The reductions perished forever, with many of the Indian tribes who lived in them...
...JOHN HANRATTY Commonweal: 415...
...Those were also the same decades when radio, movies and, above all, television grew to play such an important role in American life, But Novak's figure of 35 percent of GNP is a stage statistic, one of those props that gets repeatedly dragged out though no one knows quite where it came from or what it means...
...Not long ago it seemed that some popular writers would have had such cautions stamped at the beginning of exercises like this one...
...STU COHEN THE LOST PARADISE: THE JESUIT REDUCTIONS OF SoUTH AME~CA, by Philip Caraman, Seabury Press, $14.95...
...One has only to compare the condition of the Indians in the reductions with the condition of the Ir~dians elsewhere in the Spanish colonial empire to realize that the Jesuit ambition to establish reductions throughout the whole of Spanish South America, if achieved, would have been far better for the Indians than what did happen...
...They administered social and economic affairs and equipped and trained armies...
...Charles Kadushin's systematic interviews with elite intellectuals found them overwhelmingly negative toward the "counterculture" and deeply concerned about the disintegration of old values...
...The tradition of historical investigation sustained by the Jesuits of Farm Street in London (really Mount Street) is alive and well...
...Every time someone actually attempts to study these milieus with a degree of objectivity and a few instruments of measurement and documentation, the results turn out to be almost boringly similar...
...Yet even if one ventures into what (Continued on page 415) lands are many things," Caudill says, "but most of all they are a warning...
...So is the production of "instruments of knowledge" like typewriters, thermometers and bathroom scales...
...One who has some experience of Jesuit management recognizes at least a halftruth in this charge...
...Machlup, for example, includes education as part of the knowledge industry-who wouldn't...
...archy...
...C. studies in this book one of the more controversial episodes in the history of the Society of Jesus before its suppression in 1773...
...It deserves serious study and reasoned comment...
...The Know-Everythings, in short, are carriers of "cuRural nihilism...
...Among politicians and the news media, a prolonged hysteria reigns because 40% of Quebec voters have supported a government dedicated to secession...
...The real damage is to our own lucidity about society's probl.'ms...
...It could have been Kevin Phillips or Irving Kristol or Patrick J. Buchanan or, in a slightly more refined manner, Robert Nisbet, Hilton Kramer, or Daniel Moynihan...
...In addition, a comparison--which C. modestly did not make--between the reductions and the abominable treatment given the Indians by the government of the United States after 1789 suggests that the reductions were the most successful encounter between Europeans and the American aborigines since 1492...
...To give but one telling statistic, in the half century between 1920 and 1972 the number of faculty members in American colleges and universities increased from 48,000 to over 600,000, with a quarter of that growth occurring in a mere five years between 1965 and 1970...
...The author of this outburst happened to be Michael Novak...
...In such an atmosphere, such balanced, thoughtful analysis as Mr...
...Meanwhile, accusations like Novak's are as exaggerated and groundless as anything since the days when McCarthyists saw a godless, knife-between-theteeth Bolshevik in anyone expressing a fond hope for UNICEF...
...They are "caught up in cycles of state engineering, tremendous welfare corruption in every field and private decadence," all in marked contrast to the beliefs of "most Americans"-"the traditional values of honesty, decency, hard work, competitive advancement, religious faith, compassion for the suffering, and social cooperation...
...The products of this tradition are marked by full and careful examination of all the pertinent documents, visits to the sites, and the use of a crisp, clear and quite readable English prose...
...These critics are implying that the reductions made it impossible for the Indians ever to grow up...
...Few politicians or analysts care to dwell on it, but many English-speakers want French-speaking Canadians r learn English and become assimilated with the rest of the country...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 13
