AMERICAN JITTERS
Robbins, Richard
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT, by Arnold A. Rogow. New York: G.B. Putnam's Sons. 384 pp. $10.00. A merica is bleak house. Arnold Rogow, a political scientist whose work has always transcended...
...NEARLY THE WHOLE of The Dying of the Light consists of the indictment's bill of particulars...
...The outlook of the white working class, of critical importance in American life, doesn't sufficiently engage Rogow's interest in his otherwise trenchant analysis of economic inequality and racial discrimination...
...Foreign policy is guided by the defense establishment and characterized by a mindless series of interventions with shattering consequences, as in Vietnam...
...Rogow has not been willing to acknowledge the resilience and strength of a great many political and social groups—reformists, if the word is still acceptable—people who have sufficient power, within American pluralism, to combat the worst political and economic excesses that form the burden of Rogow's pessimism...
...the garrison state looms ahead...
...Arnold Rogow, a political scientist whose work has always transcended traditional academic divisions of labor and who combines the perspectives of cultural critic and Freudian student of our civilization and its discontents, here presents a scathing indictment of American society...
...Even the questions, let alone the answers, are here most complex, and it would be fatuous to demand that Rogow produce his I2-point program for averting catastrophe by the year 2,000...
...The Rogovian guided tour begins with the premise, psychoanalytically rooted, that the central, permanent, and essentially irreversible trend is the decline of the superego and the continuing loss of affect (or of the capacity to feel and to respond to others), a further expansion of permissive sexual culture . . . and decline of the family, diminishing ethnic and cultural diversity (and the eventual dominance in the world of a universal mass or "pop" culture of which the leading characteristics are American), increasing conflict between hedonistic consumption and resource scarcity, and a movement away from traditional individual and personal freedoms...
...we need to know more about rekindling the light...
...The family is severely buffeted and peer-group culture and sexual "freedom" do not replace it...
...The counterculture cannot rebuild the cities...
...Within the United States, [he writes at the very end] a reduction in spending on private affluence, changes in the tax laws, and a reduced military budget would free a large amount of money for social experimentation and the improvement of factories, schools, hospitals, institutions for old people, prisons...
...Here is how we drift, he says, while our problems persist...
...But, in the short run, thanks to such groups, the light doesn't die in this or that corner of American society...
...The crisis of the cities, measured in housing blight, crime, violence, deteriorating public transportation, and scores of other indices, is likely to intensify...
...It is a kind of rejoinder to the new minimalists who argue, on the basis of "failed" programs never seriously developed, that less is more in the arena of social change...
...A grim tour, a familiar indictment...
...All the more reason, then, to cite two basic difficulties...
...Income inequality remains obdurate, the poverty problem more serious for those in the lowest fifth of the population...
...With so lengthy an indictment and so sketchy a political debate, The Dying of the Light is rather out of balance...
...Some of the illustrative material, from the 60s, now is dated...
...Black men and women in the urban ghettos are still the victims of a system that fails to provide them with jobs and decent schools—and then asserts their "inferiority...
...Yet it is surprising that a political scientist should be so comprehensive on the state of our present condition and so sketchy on the subject of remedy...
...We all know this...
...Rogow's tour ends with the assertion that the erosion of the superego, broadly conceived as "the conscience and sensibility of the Western mind," might be averted by a domestic "revolution of falling expectations," wherein limited economic growth and the curbing of unrestrained corporate greed would provide the social space for change...
...For the most part it works out because Rogow's purpose is neither to denounce/ renounce the masses in the fashion of T.S...
...What rescues Rogow's book from being one more mini-Decline of the West is a biting wit, a consistent but realistic faith in the democratic experiece (for all the pessimism on every other page), and a striking gift, very rare among political scientists, of being able to join together in one coherent argument the received ideas of Western humanism and the day-to-day accounts of our patchwork American culture.The Pop psychology books, the sex manuals, the best and worst movies, the quick-fix magazines, stories from the New York Times, the TV portraits, and the language of the young (I mean, like, you know, the songs)—all these are part of Rogow's intellectual baggage along with his worn copies of the Federalist Papers and Kafka's novels...
...But how to begin to compel, within a democratic framework, that transfer of resources...
...The flaying of suburbia has been done before, and better...
...Otherwise, poverty, racism, blighted cities, and the narcotic of mass culture remain with us...
...Politically, ever since the time of the Founding Fathers, conservatism has been more characteristic than reformism...
...We know about the dying...
...Finally, what is ultimately rather frustrating about Rogow's book, for all its wit, force, and eloquence, is the absence of a sustained and wideranging discussion of the kind of political strategy required to initiate the changes that lead to a "revolution of falling expectations" and a reversal of the deteriorating quality of American life...
...Agreed...
...Rogow urges American society to "restructure its institutions," but he says all too little about how to structure the restructuring...
...In the metaphoric title, the light of reason only flickers dimly and the darkness of mass culture settles over the American landscape in this bicentennial year...
...Chavez's unionism and Nader's consumerism do not, of course, change the system...
...Eliot, nor to embrace the new mass culture as an authentic revolution of feeling in the style of Leslie Fiedler ("Id shall flourish once again...
...No doubt, The Dying of the Light will find its way to predisposed readers who are likely to agree with the indictment and accept the main lines of the argument...
...I am roughly in that company...
...Still, in the retelling Rogow's book achieves a certain cumulative eloquence...
...But I doubt that there will be any quarrel with his general argument...
...The domination by corporate power has not yet been challenged...
...Political leadership is conspicuously absent...
...The women's movement, an index of real and deep structural change, receives virtually no attention...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
