Technology And The "New Samurai"
Coser, Lewis
THE NEXT GENERATION: THE PROSPECTS AHEAD FOR THE YOUTH OF TODAY AND TOMORROW, by Donald M. Michael. Vintage Press. xxvi and 218 pp. $1.65. This is a curious book. Written originally as a...
...Michael foretells a future which he views with evident distaste, yet seems to counsel adjustment to it...
...One can therefore sympathize with Michael's perplexities...
...Will the Berkeley students be satisfied with this counsel of despair...
...Michael considers it plausible that in the next twenty years a baby's sex may be predetermined or, at least, that the probability for it to be of a chosen sex can be increased...
...They must learn to avoid distracting concerns with personal values and experiences and prepare themselves methodically for getting to the top...
...Michael focuses attention upon the impact of technology on education and class structure, but this book also deals with a host of other matters...
...Written originally as a report to an agency of the federal government, it presents educated guesses as to probable trends into the future that awaits us...
...Skilled technicians, on the other hand, will not have to submit to similar rigorous educational training...
...He makes it appear as if the future he predicts will be hardly affected by political decisions...
...It seems entirely wrong to suggest that we "smash the machines," in face of technological developments which promise a tremendous release from human toil and misery, even as they do raise the spectre of 1984...
...He does not believe that a resurgence of the Protestant Ethic can halt the drift...
...The book therefore suffers from a kind of built-in ambivalence...
...Organ transplants may become feasible so that organ banks, similar to blood banks, may become standard equipment...
...He finds it depressing...
...These computers will provide decision-makers with unprecedented powers of anticipation and planning...
...He has no taste for the upbeat endings with which the Vance Packards and William H. Whytes usually conclude their descriptions of decay...
...Many of the utopian proposals of Paul Goodman and others seem too remote from the realities of technological drift to offer much of a chance for its reversal...
...Today's computers still need to be programmed...
...A disproportionately high number of this unskilled work force will be Negroes, if for no other reason than that Negroes will not, at least in the immediate future, receive an education that equips them for the more demanding jobs...
...The badly educated underclass, finally, will receive improved welfare benefits, but since post-industrial society will have a large reservoir of competitors for the remaining menial tasks, they will be a socially disinherited group of largely superfluous men...
...but they will not need the sustained immersion in highly specialized studies which mark the professionals...
...Being highly mobile and adaptable, they will need less inner discipline and rigor...
...But technological determinism has proved inadequate for an understanding of the past, and I am not convinced it is adequate for a prediction of the future...
...A fascinating chapter is devoted to expected break-throughs in biology and medical techniques...
...hence its educational system will be geared to the demands of technology...
...In the meritocracy of the future, the top elite of planners and decisionmakers, a kind of New Samurai, will have the educational background to deal with complex technological, scien• tific and managerial problems...
...The sorting-out process through which people will be channeled into the main three strata will start early, since the kind of education received will largely determine a child's future...
...Later on in their careers they will be well paid and have more leisure than their professional betters...
...The next layer, the skilled technicians, will be excluded from decision-making powers but will be rewarded by larger opportunities for leisure...
...One wonders how the young men of the future, to whose problems this book is addressed, will react...
...But enough...
...The rationalization of techniques will require a corresponding rationalization of men...
...Michael predicts the emergence of a three-tier educational structure whose "output" will be channeled into the three major strata of the new society...
...Perhaps Michael's difficulty stems from his almost complete neglect of political factors...
...I am not at all sure myself about the appropriate attitude to take toward these future trends...
...yet this is not to say that it will be its only and sufficient cause...
...Granted that technology will impose certain limits upon human action and will condition it to a considerable degree...
...Their power will be rooted in their expertise...
...But this leaves him with no more than an injunction to adjust to an inevitable situation...
...Many people will live with sensors permanently imbedded in their bodies, transmitting information through them to the outside...
...If you can't beat the trend, join it...
...Within the next twenty years we will develop a hitherto unimaginable capacity for the manipulation of the material and human environment...
...No matter what party or group will hold the tiller, the course will be determined by the technological drifts and tides...
...He discusses, though often very sketchily, the impact of readily available oral contraceptives on sexual morality, the effects of traffic congestion and freshwater shortage on urban planning...
...Some physiological measures taken by the sensors may be read to the doctor by the patient, even as people now read thermometers...
...Michael's is an ambivalence which most of us probably share to one degree or another...
...Able to choose their careers later than the pre-professionals, they will have more time to "play around...
...The unskilled and under-educated, finally, will be poorly prepared and motivated for the technological society...
...Michael concludes that "the picture we have surveyed is not a tidy or a very pleasant one...
...Cybernation and related techniques will not only lead to rapid increases in productive capacity but will revolutionize the ability to collect and use information...
...their lineal descendants will be able to do much of their own programming...
...overtones of Orwell and Huxley lurk in much that we have examined...
...Michael expects technology to be the major shaping force of the future...
...Political action, the deliberate use of political power to counteract the drift, must not be discounted...
...the mind boggles at all the gifts the technological cornucopia will offer in the near future...
...Perhaps what is happening at Selma and Berkeley right now holds more hope for us than many of the technological marvels Michael so vividly projects upon the screen of the future...
...Those preparing for professional careers will have to discipline themselves at an early age...
...Society will be rationalized to a degree that even a Max Weber, who fifty years ago spoke about the "cage of the future," could hardly have anticipated...
...The new society will put a premium on high skill...
...One even understands why he states that the poorly educated increasingly will develop their own values and beliefs justifying withdrawal from or violence toward the rest of society, while suggesting at the same time that "Without enormous and carefully planned and programmed efforts, it will become steadily more difficult to convince these people it is in their interest and within their ability to share the values and viewpoints of the society which has so grievously deprived them...
...The skills they acquire must be flexible since they will have to adapt themselves to rapid changes in techniques...
...They will also be poorly paid...
...Yet one feels throughout the book that the author sees no way to escape the very technological determinism which appalls him...
...But the author is also a critical thinker who probably traces his intellectual ancestry to Veblen or Galbraith...
...Might we not put our cautious hopes in the chance that a combined revolt of the underclasses and of those youths who refuse to accept the lures of meritocratic education and rationed comforts might yet help to master the drift...
...I do not wish to sound smug...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
