The Peanut Butter Statement

...The Peanut Butter Statement The Greening of America By Charles A Reich Random House 399 pp $7 95 Reviewed by Nathan Glazer Author, "Remembering the Answers Essays on the American Student Revolt" As everyone by now knows, this book by a Yale Law School Professor describes the United States as moving through three periods of Consciousness—I, II and II, corresponding roughly to the period of the individualistic Protestant Ethic, the Corporate State (our own time), and the world of the future (already visible in the youth culture) Consciousness I and II may have had their good moments, but Charles A Reich does not linger on them In his scheme...

...Consciousness II (or the Corporate State on which it is based) today saddles us with a thoroughly inhuman society incapable of moving in any decent duec-tion, largely because of various institutional inhibitions to action Consciousness III, however, is indifferent to these systemic restraints It celebrates life, sensuality, spontaneity, community, expression It expresses itself in clothes...

...What is one to do with a book that blandly asserts as true things that simply are not true, a book that disdains any reference to facts, figures, authorities9 Clearly, there is not much one can do Reich is a prophet, so proclaimed by his publishers, the New Yorkei, a hundred revieweis and, one presumes, many thousands of readers All that is left to those of us who are not prophets, who must rely upon mundane evidence, is to continue on the weary and unprofitable path of trying to set the record straight Of course, this is hardly likely to influence Reich and his followers, he and they believe that truth is immediately apprehensible, and that appeal to dull fact or reason is the sign of a square Perhaps the main purpose in dealing with The Greening of America—as with the book of any convert—is that its author not only knows the truth but knows that everyone else's truth is false Thus he is capable of the most snobbish arrogance in putting down others for leading lives of inauthenticity, bound to tv, groveling before the advertisers, buying things they don't want and living in ways they find hateful He informs us "No person with a strongly developed aesthetic sense, a love of nature, a passion for music, a desire for reflection, or a strongly marked independence could possibly be happy or contented m a factory or white-collar job " Or, in another passage on the white-collar and blue-collar worker "But death is with them already, in their sullen boredom, their unchanging routines, their minds closed to new ideas and new feelings, their bodies slumped in front of television to watch the ball game Sunday " If this were an accurate description of American workers, it would be cruel, so cruel that Reich would never contemplate using such language for Negroes (nor would his students let him get away with it) But Reich is himself more the victim of a mass-media view of workers (his own mass media, of course) than those he believes have flaccidly submitted to the Corporate State I assume that if I suggested a survey in which we would ask residents of split-levels and owners of motor-boats, second cars and a variety of other mechanical implements whether they actually enjoyed them, and to what extent they have been influenced by advertising and tv, Professor Reich would only smile at my earth-bound empiricism He knows "Why does an individual ski," he asks at one point "Is it based on self-knowledge, or a lack of self-knowledge, on advertising, and other pressures from society9 If the latter, then the activity will not really satisfy the self, or enable the self to grow The activity will have an essential emptiness, even though the person domg it may 'think' he enjoys it We can see many examples of this type of false consciousness in American Society today, from the unathletic secretary who risks life and limb to ski on an occasional weekend, to the man in the Nehru jacket, turtleneck, or sideburns " One really thinks that Professor Reich will be satisfied only with the authenticity on the slopes of someone who can afford to ski on weekdays (like professors9) and spend a good deal of time at it (like most ot their sabbatical9) Obviously, secretaries might argue that the difference is less in authenticity and enjoyment than in opportunity But I don't think that is likely to carry much weight with Reich, for he knows the difference between Consciousness II skiing and Consciousness III skiing as well as he knows the difference between Consciousness II peanut butter and Consciousness III peanut butter You may think this is a joke, but to Reich (who, one would judge from this sample of 400 pages of bland prose, is incapable of humor) it is a deadly serious matter We learn, for instance, that among the authorities possessed by the "public-private amalgamated state" is the "power to require peanut-butter eaters to choose between homogenized or chunky peanut butter and to prevent them from buying 'real' peanut butter " This passage has, I believe, been quoted m another review I must confess that I mention it here not only because it is the sixth in a list of 20 powers, but because when I read it I thought of the Cambridge Tea and Spice shop (there are a few m the Harvard area), where a machine takes fresh peanuts at one end and delivers peanut butter at the other—about as authentic a product as one could get I regretted that the makers of the machine (who, as I see it, operate under the pressures and rewards of Consciousness II) had not yet marketed their device in New Haven Peanut butter seems a large matter to Reich, for he has a number of leferences to it scattered throughout (including a few to mixed peanut butter and jelly, for him some kind of ultimate horror) Indeed, the peanut butter story does not end until the close of the book Trymg to envisage the society Consciousness III will bring into being, Reich describes an all-night supermarket in Berkeley I know it well It has everything—delicacies from all corners of the world, hippie shoppers, hippie check-out clerks (rf they will take the job), and squarer elements It has good paperbacks and good magazines, and it has "genuine, old-fashioned, unhomogenized peanut butter " Now it there is any demand for the stuff, it is scarcely conceivable that it will not spread from Cambridge and Berkeley into the hinterlands But, one asks oneself, is that gleaming and efficient Berkeley supermarket not the product of Consciousness II rather than III9 And similarly with authentic peanut butter9 Another Reichian harbinger of the world of the future, where lion and lamb will he down together, is Woodstock I seem to recall, though, another rock festival after Woodstock, where the goings-on were more murderous than life-loving, and yet another, where there were not enough volunteer doctors to take care of all the bad trips I also understand that hard drugs and rough crime have descended upon Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, that 1967 foretaste of Consciousness III, and people no longer walk there so freely The stores Reich enjoyed three years ago have a good deal of trouble, too, because the kids who love life (and whose stealing from the Establishment appears to meet with the Professor's benevolent understanding) did not seem able after a while to tell the difference between the Establishment and their friends, pilfering from everybody indiscriminately Demonstrating the full extent of his radicalism, Reich declares that even the present arms budget would not provide enough money for the things he considers necessary "The money is now being spent for consumer goods It is being spent on all things that make up the affluent American way of life—automobiles, appliances, vacations, highways, food and clothing All of these things have reached beyond any standard of necessity to higher and higher standards of luxury" Having made this profound point, he decides to drop briefly to earth Selecting East 67th Street in Manhattan as a truly representative neighborhood, he observes that while many great apartment houses have been erected in the vicinity in the past 25 years (I suppose Reich was raised in these proletarian precincts—it seems to be the only neighborhood he can bring to mind from 25 years ago), the local library is unchanged and seedy, the high school remains the same, and the nearby City University branch has had its budget cut There is nothing like the concrete example to make a point—except Reich should know that with the rise of paperback books, it is a real problem to get people on East 67th Street to go to the library, that the expenditures tor education have risen much higher and much faster in New York City than those for private housing, and that had he gone only one block north he might have learned that enormous buildings are going up to expand the facilities of free and public Hunter College The financial outlays for free higher education, in fact, have increased even faster than those for public education But as I have said, Reich is indifferent to facts He knows how people should spend their money "Even symphony orchestras are trapped in the spiral of rising expenditures for new kitchen utensils and garden implements" How shocking1 Not only does Reich look with distaste on the middle- and lower-class skier of insufficient skill (who may well have responded to one of those disgusting mass-media advertisements for a "ski weekend, all expenses covered, including lessons"), and on the working man watching the Sunday football game on television, but he would go so far as to deny those pathetic creatures (all suffering from "false consciousness," you will recall) the right to spend their money on kitchens and gardens—though these might be more suited to their inferior talents No, even that pittance we must take for the symphony orchestras Whenever a man can write of another that he "thinks" he is enjoying something, or that his pleasures are only the manifestation of "false consciousness," we should be skeptical of him At this point Reich merely wants to get 'the victims of the Corporate State out walking the trails, an activity he "knows" is truly more "enjoyable" In the next stage he might get these unfortunates to work at voluntary labor on the trails, in communal groups—undoubtedly an even more elevated level of "real" enjoyment and "true consciousness " We should be equally wary whenever a writer seems to have developed an interest in convincing people who live under freedom that they are "really" living under a dictatorship Reich says almost at the outset " the media systematically deny any fundamentally different or dissenting point of view a chance to be heard at all " A little later he continues "The American people, who fled the monarchies of Europe, had only a few decades of freedom before they were conquered by a set of auto-ciais wielding, if anything, greater power than the old" Why should anyone make such ridiculous statements—unless he has up his sleeve a "real" freedom superior to our low-grade, "false-consciousness freedom,' defended by such outmoded mechanisms as law and constitutional rights...

...Bureaucracies, meanwhile, have been receivmg their strongest jolts The enormous growth of the welfare rolls, for example, is a result of the courts' overruling certain bureaucratic strictures (such as residence requirements and man-in-the-house regulations) that have served to keep down the number of families on public assistance...

...Finally, we should be suspicious of anyone who tells us "the Consciousness III community transcends the technological state by restoring some of the wordless security and sharing of tribal man", who celebrates the organic community by saying "the squirrel needs the acorn and the acorn needs the squirrel" (who is to be the squirrel, and who the acorn''), who pronounces that the Consciousness III person "does not 'know' the facts, but he stdl 'knows' the truth that seems hidden from others" (such truths as Nixon and Agnew's decision to cancel the 1972 elections''), who applauds "the new emphasis on imagination, the senses, community, and the self", and who warns, "it should not be forgotten that we are .a country m which more than half the population is under twenty-five Most power is in the hands of the older half, but could they maintain it m a struggle''" Where now, in a modern industrial community, have we heard most recently this nonsense about the organic community, the wordless tribe, the senses, the youth'' Only blood is missing Some of us remember this language, and shudder...

...Fear is known to keep the aged indoors in many municipal housing projects, yet local housmg authorities are often not permitted to eject "unsuitable" tenants, e g , drug addicts, one of whom was recently caught after murdering an elderly tenant in a New York City project These rulings, moreover, are attributable to the work of the many hundreds of lawyers at present employed through Federal and foundation funds to assist the poor in shakmg the bureaucracies that affect their housing, income and health As for repression, a recent study by Gary Marx notes that the police are now much less repressive in puttmg down riots than they were in the past A piece in the New York Times Book Review last month by an authority on criminal law supports Marx, pointing out that police violence and brutality have been enormously reduced, it is inconceivable that today, as happened in 1945, a liberal mayor (LaGuardia) would call upon his police chief to "muss up" (that is, beat up) suspects, and that the police chief would enthusiastically concur I think most people would agree, too, that security restrictions on employment are far less severe than they were 10-15 years ago...

...hair styles, body movement, sex, drugs, draft resistance, communes Woodstock—or Berkeley 1967, where Professor Reich spent a summer—is the new society taking shape in the womb of the old Extending its message from youth to the less young and the middle aged is the current task, once that is accomplished, all the problems Professor Reich mentions on occasion (war, imperialism, housing, health, conservation, transportation) will disappear Any review at this point must be supererogatory, since The Greening of Amenca has been widely discussed and is almost a regular feature on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, where it has been summarized, praised and attacked from the Right—whose adherents ask, "but who will mind the store9" (even John Kenneth Galbraith has raised this point, gently)—as well as from the Left—most prommently by Herbert Marcuse, who asks, isn't it naive to expect the Consciousness II people to give up so easily, and allow peace, uncongested transportation, undisturbed wilderness, and good housing and health care to triumph, when they benefit from the alternative9 My difficulty with this book is that the author's view of existing reality is so radically different from mine To take one brief sample, Reich writes "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights have been weakened, imperceptibly but steadily [sic] The nation has gradually become a rigid managerial hierarchy, with a small elite and a great mass of the disenfranchised Liberty has been eroded and bureaucratic discretion has taken the place of the rule of law Today both dissent and efforts at change are dealt with by repression The pervasiveness of police, security men, the military and compulsory military service show the changed character of American liberty " Now it was my unpression that the Bill ot Rights has never been stronger under its protection, appeals to revolution and violence and pornography flourish as never before The number of potential voters has grown steadily, particularly among Negroes in the South, and enfranchisement has spread...