Beyond Alienation
KAUFMAN, ARNOLD S.
BOOKS Beyond Alienation by ARNOLD S. KAUFMAN In The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak claims that advanced industrial societies are totalitarian technocracies. A technocracy is able to...
...The passage from politics to poetry is, from a tactical point of view, a passage from rational persuasion to spiritual conversion...
...But Roszak has a second line of defense...
...In place of science, the counterculture rightly aims to reinstate magic and mystery...
...Had Roszak confined his account to description, interpretation, and explanation of the counter culture, his book would have been unqualifiedly valuable...
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...All that may be said is that, just as different kinds of mammals exist, so different kinds of experiences exist...
...For objective consciousness empties the inner man of emotional riches, unfits him for joy and the exaltation of mystic insight...
...It must be said that Roszak does not defend the use of hallucinatory drugs on the basis of their epistemological merits...
...Roszak claims that in deploring "crackpot realism," C. Wright Mills was attacking failure to cling to poetic vision in political action...
...While the complex problems involved in trying to establish the possibility of scientific objectivity can not be discussed here, a careful reading of Israel Scheffler's Science and Subjectivity (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) may allay some of Roszak's anxieties...
...However fruitful each kind of experience may be as a source of truths, the truths generated cannot be known until they pass tests that require the application of objective consciousness...
...That is, mystical intuitions and all other cognitive hunches must be validated scientifically, or in some other way certified in accordance with canons of reason...
...So can the postoperative ecstasies of someone coming out of anesthesia, the heightened passions of an individual in orgasm, or the excitement of a player who has just scored the winning touchdown...
...But this inference commits the same absurdity as supposing that because cows are alternative to and just as real as whales, that one species of mammal, the cow, is opposed to another species, the whale...
...First, he does not share Marcuse's faith in the ability of counter-cultural youths to enter into stable coalition with those who suffer material poverty...
...However, the point does bear on another of Roszak's illogicalities...
...Most important, his account of the counter culture not only forces one to view more clearly the ways in which the prevailing culture has gone wrong, but also to identify more carefully the respects in which technocracy provides a basis for social progress...
...And this is precisely what many of our dissenting young are doing...
...Thus the liberal cold warrior could, without critical qualm, convince himself that realism required support of the Tonkin Bay Resolution...
...Theirs is a politics of self-indulgence as culpable as the politics of crackpot realism...
...And he was right to do so...
...His work is laced with violations of the canons of rational discourse he despises...
...Quite the reverse—disciplined thought is essential...
...Though necessary, radical institutional change will not be enough to end alienation, to implant true needs...
...With Norman Brown, Roszak holds that "The next generation needs to be told that the real fight is not the political fight, but to put an end to politics...
...In other words, far from moving from politics to poetry, Mills persistently reaffirmed the value of an authentic commitment to a defensible conception of practical reason...
...My own view is that once one makes sense of the distinction between true and false needs, once one has an accurate picture of how basic preferences are technocratically manipulated, then one sees that a main defense against this ultimate form of co-optation is the power of reason brought to a high pitch of development...
...But there is a respect in which Roszak is right...
...I have so far argued that Roszak fails to establish either the epistemological claim that objectivity is impossible or the psychological claim that objective consciousness is, in any event, incompatible with a human life...
...Grasping truths that minds shaped by technocracy are incapable of comprehending, the counter-cultural young fight a battle with the technocracy that they "deserve to win...
...But he disagrees with Marcuse in two important respects...
...Science underpins and permeates technocracy in ways that make a decently human existence absolutely impossible for anyone who does not totally reject the scientific mode of experience—what Roszak sometimes calls "objective consciousness...
...They can teach us something, but the young men and women of the new politics—those who fueled the McCarthy campaign and now the Vietnam Moratorium with their energies—are teaching us more, much more...
...The ultimate derangement is, rather, psychic...
...Alan Ginsberg is politically irrelevant...
...Moreover, if, as Roszak claims, the technocracy works its totalitarian evil primarily by implanting false needs, we are at least entitled to a casual effort to clarify the distinction between true and false needs...
...Reasoned political argument is particularly futile...
...No part of his book is more important than his effort to debunk science by showing that science's claim to objectivity is indefensible, its characteristic mode of objective consciousness necessarily incompatible with moral, aesthetic, and religious sensibility...
...Harrington may be wrong, Roszak right...
...The sustained thrust of his book overwhelms the qualification he makes in passing...
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...But because he so identifies with the counter cultural young, because he tries to defend their basic presuppositions, his work is, in the end, dangerously wrong...
...Indeed, it is the scientific spirit that produces "the most consequential deficiencies and imbalances of technocracy...
...In politics, reason is never more important than in resisting technocracy's totalitarian threat...
...For one thing, mystical intuition does not yield an adequate analysis of the nature of that threat...
...Roszak supposes that as alienation is a psychic phenomenon, it can be remedied only through psychic effort...
...that is, in a way that permits the technocracy, and it alone, to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for satisfying what are generally accepted as needs...
...But he writes well...
...The omission is especially disturbing in view of the fact that Michael Harrington has, on the basis of a wealth of factual evidence, argued that the lust for profit continues to provide the chief explanation of America's social ills (in Toward a Democratic Left...
...303 pp...
...Thus it turns out that Alan Ginsberg is the politician par excellence...
...For people like Hoffman, politics is an ecstasy, not a rational enterprise that aims at definite policy goals...
...Far from wanting to skip the bourgeois stage, the poor mostly want to "make it" in the affluent man's world...
...Roszak, an historian at California State College and editor of The Dissenting Academy, shares Herbert Mar-cuse's belief that technocracy dehumanizes lives primarily through co-optation...
...He seems to think that because objective consciousness is not the only mode of experience, because the other modes of experience are just as real, that these other modes are alternative to objective consciousness in the sense of being opposed to it...
...Yet, Roszak's claim does have some plausibility...
...Many sections of his book are perceptive, some even closely reasoned...
...And a good thing too...
...He invokes the authority of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi to suggest that scientific objectivity is a myth...
...The counter-cultural young give us an intimation of this change by moving from politics to poetry...
...This is an important point, because any tendency to enter into political coalitions with other groups deflects the forces of the counter-culture from their historic mission...
...Not surprisingly, then, Roszak ends his book with a plea for mystical pantheism that is as eloquent as it is definite in its call for the abandonment of the disciplines of reason...
...The effort to be objective does require that subjective bias be self-controlled...
...Even a scholarly repetition of Marcuse's confused attempt to provide this clarification would be better than Roszak's complete silence...
...They seek personal salvation through political action—even at the expense of Vietnamese and American lives...
...My criticisms of Roszak's basic claims have been harsh...
...In no part of his argument is this clearer than in defense of what he regards as his most basic thesis—the claim that science and a human existence are in absolute conflict...
...So defined, fulfillment of these needs prevents men from living a genuinely human existence...
...A technocracy is able to penetrate individual lives totally by inducing its members to define their vital human needs in a way that facilitates co-optation...
...His criticism was aimed at those who irrationally sacrificed values to which they claim to be committed because of a deranged realism that is supposed to lie at the very core of reason in political life...
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...but the dispute is worth at least a passing mention...
...Roszak's conviction that this is so pivots on his belief that the very effort to be objective is spiritually enervating...
...Secondly, Roszak rightly supposes that mystical experience can be a source of truths...
...grave and pugnacious quality in favor of a festive dancing and chanting parade" will they be able to penetrate the strong psychic defenses generated by technocracy...
...A third, more serious, error, flows from the first two mistakes...
...Thus the book promotes precisely what Roszak is theoretically committed to discouraging —a more objective, dispassionate examination of things that have momentous political import...
...This is nonsense...
...Sam Brown is the politician par excellence...
...For the counter culture threatens the very qualities upon which our best hope for a brighter future depends—a disciplined ability to reason and a morally passionate commitment to a politics that is both rational and relatively independent of the quest for personal salvation...
...In claiming that the technocracy's main functional imperative is rationalization of the total economy, not the profit motive, Roszak makes no appeal to grubby evidence...
...The counter culture exists, is important, and Roszak has written an illuminating account of it...
...Moreover, Thomas Kuhn contradicts himself on the very point at issue in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions...
...Indeed, his critical discussion of the drug scene is the best chapter in his book...
...But Mills meant something quite different...
...Second, Roszak rejects Marcuse's conviction that the ultimate source of technocracy's malaise lies in its social arrangements...
...Similarly, when Abbie Hoffman plans a guerrilla raid on the "Department of Injustice," he is unmoved by the argument that his action will be counterproductive...
...Happily, the counter-cultural young are but a small minority of those who are in motion—an aberrant splinter, not a vanguard...
...The only kind of politics that is worthwhile is that which transcends itself by giving people a vision of the beatific world that lies beyond technocracy, beyond all traditional political ideas, and especially beyond science...
...The culture of youth that is emerging is our best hope for a better America and a better world...
...not a personal regimen that induces mystical ecstasy at the cost of a rational thought...
...The higher discontents of those who shape the counter-culture are not the discontents of those who are downtrodden...
...Ginsberg is among the few who understand that only when those in politics "lay aside their usually The Making of a Counter Culture, by Theodore Roszak...
...The only hope for transforming "this disoriented civilization of ours into something a human being can identify as home" lies, Roszak says, in creating a counter culture that substitutes true needs for false ones...
...And the point is most important with respect to political action...
...As Marx understood, the misery caused by alienation in the workplace is a psychic state that can be changed for the better by restructuring the institutions of the workplace through political struggle...
...In his person, politics is not only subordinated to but completely fused with the mystical poet's quest for personal salvation...
...Roszak repudiates the very thing most necessary if technocracy is ever to be made to serve human ends—the disciplines of reason...
...It would be history's greatest irony if the very capacity that most decisively marks man off from other animals, the capacity for reasoned discourse, turned out, upon analysis, to be the main obstacle in man's pursuit of a human existence...
...For he glimpses a higher tactical truth that is exempt from mere political calculation...
...Or to put it another way, as to have false needs is to be in a certain psychological state, political effort cannot provide a remedy...
...Roszak's failure to see that this is so is because he is mislead by two other trivial truths...
...But not the personal regimen Roszak charts...
...But this is a complex philosophical thesis that cannot be elaborated here...
...A personal effort is also required...
...Abbie Hoffman is a political disaster...
...to lead us back to the primitive wisdom of the shaman who grasps mystic truths inaccessible to those tainted with objective consciousness...
...But from this it neither foll6ws that the soul need be emptied of its inner riches, nor that objective consciousness heed infect all other modes of experience...
...Consequently, remedies are not mainly to be achieved through political action that aims at institutional change...
...Though Roszak does mention that some "old-style politicking" may be justified in the case of "immediate emergencies" like the Vietnam war, racial injustice, and hard-core poverty, he is relentless in attacking a rational politics that is relatively independent of one's quest for personal salvation...
...Now, there is a trivial respect in which the thesis is true tautologically...
...There is, however, one respect in which Roszak achieves complete success...
Vol. 34 • February 1970 • No. 2
