Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Morris Ernst's New Book Predicts Pie in the Sky Within Two Decades Some weeks ago (NL, September 19), I discussed Erich Fromm's melancholy views of...
...The hydrogen bomb, he says, has made war so terrible that no country will dare attack another...
...Nobody is going to reproach Morris Ernst for being pessimistic...
...Some of them, indeed, he does reach in this way: The figures on income and leisure, for instance, may be all wrong, but at least they indicate the direction in which our economy is currently moving...
...It is, I am afraid, a shallow and sometimes a silly book...
...Fromm seems sensitive and wise...
...Moreover, Ernst's invincible cheerfulness has the virtue of pointing the way to practical courses of action...
...Taken as what it is, a projection of Mr...
...He drags out the familiar and utterly misleading analogy of the emergence of our Constitution out of the weakness of the Articles of Confederation...
...The common cold will have been vanquished, and a contraceptive pill will have been developed...
...The United Nations will grow strong and effective...
...Major reforms will have taken place in religion, education, government and law...
...He does not believe that all production can be placed in the hands of small units, but he would use the power of the Government to maintain as many small units as possible...
...Yet, some of the points Ernst makes do great damage to Fromm's indictment of contemporary civilization...
...his claims for progress in medicine seem absurdly large, but there is no reason not to believe that considerable progress will be made...
...Ernst's hopes and desires, it is not particularly interesting...
...As I said in my review of The Sane Society, our hope should be placed not in large formulas for salvation but in feasible plans for resisting the dangerous tendencies in our civilization...
...In Utopia 1976 (Rinehart, $3.50), he soberly asserts not merely that we can achieve Utopia in a couple of decades but that in all probability we will...
...By comparison with Mr...
...More than 61 million votes were cast in 1952...
...Fromm, in his desperate alarm, sees hope only in rigorous decentralization, both political and economic...
...Taken as what it purports to be, a sober, realistic prediction of things to come, it must be viewed with the greatest skepticism...
...Our propaganda will work wonders behind the Iron Curtain...
...Ernst is no less biased than Fromm, but at least his bias leads him to see some of the things Fromm overlooks...
...Ernst's book does call attention to concrete possibilities and opportunities, and these we can make the most of...
...Ernst is most annoyingly bland in his comments on the threat of war...
...By the time we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he says, the average family income in the United Stales will be $25,000 a year and the usual work week will be 30 hours...
...And he is sometimes careless, as when he writes, "Today in a hotly contested Presidential election, with no less than $10 million dollars spent on radio, advertising and television, we get only 6 per cent of our potential voters to the ballot boxes...
...Ernst expects comparable reversals in education, government and entertainment...
...Many of his predictions, however, are based on a process that is the opposite of extrapolation: He assumes that the present tendency is so bad that it will be reversed...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Morris Ernst's New Book Predicts Pie in the Sky Within Two Decades Some weeks ago (NL, September 19), I discussed Erich Fromm's melancholy views of contemporary civilization as set forth in The Sane Society...
...He does not argue, as Fromm does, that national policies can be determined in town meetings, but he does recommend that all the functions should be restored to local government of which it is capable...
...With all its faults, Mr...
...This process is exhibited in the chapter on business, which prophesies that the people will get fed up with monopoly and will force the Government to restore competition and encourage small business...
...he even predicts that the book business will be flourishing in 1976...
...Ernst also believes in decentralization but only to a degree that is compatible with the continued functioning of the Great Society...
...Again and again, Ernst makes it clear that prosperity, instead of resulting in universal slavery as Fromm insists, is giving millions of people more freedom than they have ever known...
...Even when the author is engaged in genuine extrapolation, his figures are not always to be trusted...
...Ernst, Dr...
...According to Mr...
...Automation will be fully developed, and housekeeping will be a matter of pushing buttons...
...For the most part, the book is based not on extrapolation but, like the majority of Utopias, on wishful thinking...
...Ernst's chapter on the uses of leisure, for instance, demonstrates how ridiculous it is for Fromm to say that modern man "always remains the passive and alienated consumer...
...Ernst, he arrives at all these conclusions by a simple process of extrapolation...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
